Posts by: Jennifer Lowell

A kitchen gadget that sucks in a good way

Jennifer Lowell | Jan 30, 2009

This food vacuum is much cuter than its predecessors. (Credit: Sur la table)

Cooking primarily for one person presents a unique set of problems. For one thing, I often divide ingredients in four-person recipes by four, so I can avoid wasting food that won't keep well as leftovers. A bigger issue is that of fresh produce: Fresh fruits and vegetables go bad, as do cheeses and meats, and my taste for variety in my meals has caused me to throw away vegetables or blocks of cheese more than once.

This is an even bigger issue when dealing with organic produce, dairy, and bread, which is free from preservatives and additives that can add to the shelf life of these types of food. Living in New York, I shop a lot at the farmers market in the summers, where a lot of organic fresh food can be bought for low cost, often in quantities too large for me to eat alone.
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You cook, I cook, Wii cook

Jennifer Lowell | Jan 15, 2009

It's like a Swiss army knife for a soux chef. (Credit: Sourcing Map)

Several months ago, I wrote about the MagiCook Kitchen by Little Tikes, which won't help anyone actually create any meals, but will help to inspire a love for cooking in kids before they're old enough to start dealing with actual culinary hardware. The PlayStation and Xbox generation of kids, however, can be a bit harder to please in the toy department, and may require more high tech coaxing into loving the kitchen.

With games like Cooking Mama for the Nintendo Wii, game developers are trying to do just that. The game allows you to create food from recipes by mimicking the motions used in the kitchen. You can mime chopping vegetables and stirring soup with the Wii remote, and your actions are translated onto the screen. What's missing from gameplay, however, are the actual tools of the trade. Last time I checked, Wii remotes weren't available in the "chef's tool's" aisle of my local grocery store.
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In case you're too lazy to lick

Jennifer Lowell | Jul 28, 2008

Calories burned playing 30 minutes of basketball: 350. Calories burned taking a 30-minute yoga class: 160. Calories burned washing dishes for 30 minutes: 70.

How about the number of calories I'd burn licking an ice cream cone for 30 minutes? About 25 (although if you take the calories from the ice cream into account, then you burn, well, negative 175 calories). That being said, can someone please tell me why anyone would possibly need this motorized ice cream cone?

I'm no stranger to novelty candy. When I was in middle school, my friends and I would buy sweets by the grocery bagful and would use them as a local form of currency. The stranger candies would always be valued higher, since they usually came in containers that looked like paintbrushes, cars, milk jugs, or animals, and which could be kept and used to store other things (like our pog collections). Extra intrinsic value was awarded to anything that turned our tongues bright colors.
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