Cooking For Engineers®

Recently, I received a wireless thermometer from Thermoworks to try out. Their newest product is called Smoke and is specifically designed to help people barbecue and smoke food at home. Smoke has two parts - a base unit (which takes two of Thermoworks standardized Pro-Series probes) and a wireless receiver unit - which lets the user track the air temperature and the food temperature without going outside to the smoker.
Thermoworks is selling the Smoke at $99 and this would definitely welcome tool for anyone who likes to slow cook food outside.

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

The use of yeast gives baked goods (such as breads) both flavor and an airy lightness. Unlike chemical leaveners which react upon contact to produce gases, yeast are living organisms that digest sugars and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. Because they are living, we promote their growth and their production by providing them with warmth, food (sugars), and time. Yeast is used for a variety of purposes outside of baking (such as for brewing beer, for fermenting wine, and for ingesting as a nutritional supplement) but we'll focus on yeast for baking in this article.

A few months ago, Hefty released a new line of products called the Hefty Serve 'n Store tableware. There's nothing revolutionary about a set of plastic plates or microwavable storage containers - but the Hefty Serve 'n Store is definitely a clever improvement over its parents: the plastic disposable plates and the low-cost multi-use disposable plastic container. Each plate interlocks with another plate of the same design to form a resealable container. We tried them in our daily lives (and under some contrived tests) and they performed admirably.
Update 2008-05-27 - The Hefty Serve 'n Store product line seems to be discontinued.