I’m fond of silicone baking products, which are highly heat-resistant and yet have excellent flexibility. You can get everything from oven mitts to cookie sheet liners to baking molds made out of the stuff. But a relatively new product really intrigues me.

The Food Loop looks something like a large plastic cable tie, but it’s made of silicone and, unlike cable ties, easy to remove. One of the sample photos shows the Food Loop holding together the drumsticks of a chicken. Having recently explained, in rather annoying detail, how to truss up a turkey using string, this looks like a marvelously simple alternative. Sure, you’d still have to close up the cavities holding the stuffing, but for tying back the drumsticks, this’d be way easier.

You can pick up a package of 6 from Amazon.com for about $15.

It’s the first day of autumn, which in the United States means just one thing: the Halloween shopping season! Normally I don’t like thinking about holidays too far in advance, but all summer long I’ve had my mind on another holiday: Thanksgiving. I spent much of the summer writing, testing, and revising my latest book, Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner, and I’m pleased to announce that it’s now available for sale. If you’ve ever tried to cook a Thanksgiving feast for a crowd and run into problems (or if you’re trying it this year for the first time), this book is the solution. It walks you through every step in detail, with careful attention to timing and logistics, so that all the food will be done right and on time—with as little stress for the cook as possible. The book covers the traditional Thanksgiving dishes: roasted turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie.

American readers may be thinking that even late September is rather early to be talking about a late-November holiday, but we wanted to get the book out in plenty of time for folks in Canada, where Thanksgiving falls on October 9 this year. (And by the way, I’ve included metric equivalents for all the measurements!) Because some of the planning tasks I recommend can usefully be done a few weeks before Thanksgiving, we wanted to get it out as quickly as we could. (It would have been published last week, in fact, were it not for a last-minute logistical glitch involving the illustrations. Props to illustrator Jeff Tolbert for rapidly and brilliantly solving all our graphical problems.)

This 104-page book is initially available in electronic form. The ebook costs US$10 and can be downloaded immediately; you can then, if you wish, print it yourself. We’re working hard to get a custom-printed, spiral-bound version ready, and it should be available within a couple of weeks or so (but, I’m afraid, not in time for Thanksgiving in Canada—sorry!). Either way, you also get a downloadable “Print Me” file containing the shopping lists, recipes, and schedules, so that you have something you can tape up in the kitchen, write on, and take with you to the store.

Although I’m no stranger to writing books and ebooks, this project is quite a departure for me, as I normally cover computer-related topics. But I love to cook, too, and have wanted to write a book about food for some time. The publisher and I figured that if I can make something complicated like backing up your computer or installing a new operating system easy to understand, I should be able to do the same thing for a similarly involved cooking project, and I believe I’ve succeeded with this book. You don’t have to be a computer geek (or a cooking geek!) to follow my instructions; the book is written in plain, nontechnical English. As long as you can boil water or chop celery, you should be in good shape.

As time goes on (and particularly in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving), look for more information, tips, and details on this site relating to Thanksgiving dinner. In the meantime, if you plan to cook the big feast this year, please do yourself (and me!) a favor by picking up the new book. I think you’ll find it well worth the money!

I’d like to sing the praises of my coffee machine for a moment. I know: it’s just a machine. And yet, as gadgets go, I’ve become extraordinarily attached to it. I’d sooner go without a microwave oven, my Henckels knives, or my All-Clad pans than my coffee machine. I like it that much.

The one I have is a Saeco Royal Professional. It’s several years old (and the company now offers several newer and sexier models); we bought it used on eBay for the bargain price of $1300 (new ones were going for considerably more at the time). It’s a superautomatic coffee machine, which means it does absolutely everything with the touch of a single button: grinds the coffee beans, tamps them down, shoots pressurized steam through them to make your coffee, and ejects the used grounds into an internal holding container. You can program the temperature and the amount of coffee produced by any of the three preset concentrations—small (an espresso), medium (Swiss-style), or large (roughly the American concentration). You can adjust the fineness of the grind and the amount of coffee used per dose. And on and on. It’s a wondrous thing.

Needless to say, $1300 is a lot to pay for a coffee maker (though there are, certainly, more-expensive models). But it’s been well worth the investment. We use it numerous times every day, and every single cup of coffee makes me happy. But more importantly, it’s saved us a ton of money on the designer coffees we’d otherwise have bought from one of the local purveyors.

There’s just one wee problem. The automatic milk frothing attachment hasn’t been working lately. This means I’ll have to send it in for servicing. I sent it to Saeco once before for something or other when we first got it, and other than having to maneuver a huge box to the local UPS depot, the process was painless. Now, of course, it’s long out of warranty, so I’ll be paying for the service. But it’s not the money that concerns me; it’s being without my coffee maker for—what? Days? Weeks? How will I cope? The thought of having to make my coffee the old-fashioned way is almost enough to send me to Starbucks.

A couple of months ago, I started running into my dentist pretty frequently while walking around and shopping in my San Francisco neighborhood. He told me he’d recently opened a new office, which conveniently is only a few blocks from my home. Shortly thereafter, I ran into him again at, of all places, a restaurant supply store. I was there shopping for apparatus I needed in the course of testing recipes for Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner. He told me that along with his brothers, he was about to open a new restaurant just over the hill in Noe Valley, in a space formerly occupied by a diner called Hungry Joe’s (no relation).

The new restaurant is called the Toast Eatery. It’s a small but classy, modern diner-type place with a terrific selection of omelets, salads, burgers, sandwiches, and similar fare. We stopped in for brunch when they’d been open less than a week, and found both the food and the service to be excellent—though of course we can’t make an entirely objective assessment since they’re surely trying extra hard to please their new customers, and since we know one of the proprietors. (He stopped by our table and asked if he could bring us anything else, and right after asking for butter I realized I’d missed a great opportunity. I should have said “floss.”)

I suspect we’ll be eating there often. It’s our kind of food (not entirely South Beach Diet-friendly, but I can hardly fault them for that), and the place has a nice, friendly vibe. The several other times we’ve been past it, it’s been hopping with customers, both inside and outside on the sidewalk tables. Be sure to save room for the lemon cheesecake.

If you’re looking for a nice place in San Francisco for a light meal, drop by Toast at 1748 Church Street (at Day). They’re open 7 days a week: 7–9 Monday through Saturday; 7–4 on Sundays.

And by the way, if you need a good dentist, go to Anise Naser at Diamond Dental. I can’t recommend him highly enough—he’s done excellent work (including a couple of root canals and crowns) and he really takes an interest in his patients.

In the process of working on Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner, I mentioned the items you’ll have to remove from the inside of your fresh or frozen turkey: the neck and the giblets (heart, gizzard, and liver). These parts aren’t usually eaten, but they can be used to make an excellent gravy. I wanted to make the point that I recommend leaving out the liver, which might add undesirable flavors to the gravy, but in order to explain to the uninitiated which one of these weird tissue masses was the liver, I had to give a verbal description of the size, shape, and color of each item that constitutes the giblets. Upon reading my description, the publisher felt that a picture would serve better, and I agreed, so I snapped a shot of the neck and giblets sitting on my cutting board the next time I roasted a turkey.

Now granted, if you’re not used to mucking around with animal insides, this sort of thing might strike you as kind of gross. But I was unprepared for the strong “yuck” reaction I got from my editor and publisher. Although they were both seasoned cooks and had dealt with these things personally numerous times, they thought the picture was somehow just too graphic and unappetizing to include in the book. My view was that if you’re going to see it and touch it in real life, it shouldn’t be a big deal to see a picture—but I was overruled, and we had a drawing made instead.

However, I did include a link to this post, wherein I’m pleased to present the full-size, not-for-the-queasy photo of the giblets (click the thumbnail to see the larger image). That’s the neck on the left, of course; on the right, from top to bottom, are the heart, gizzard, and liver. Obviously, the exact appearance (and size) of these items will depend on what sort of turkey you buy and how it’s butchered. But this should give you a pretty good idea of what you’re looking for. Whatever else you do, be sure to check both cavities (the large one at the tail end and the small one at the neck end) for these items—often found in plastic bags—and remove them before cooking the turkey!

Morgen and I have been (mostly) on the South Beach Diet for a couple of months, and for those who know anything about it, it involves eating a lot of eggs. As a result, I’ve been thinking more than usual about different ways of cooking them, just to have some variety.

Still, I was a bit shocked to find out how many different ways people had come up with to perform the mysterious process of hard-boiling eggs; I listed seven of them on SenseList. Why should it be that hard or confusing?

Further research led me to this page at Khymos.org, which digs into the science of egg cooking in excruciating (and fascinating) detail. It turns out that all the methods in my list are really approximations, because they don’t take into account important variables such as egg size, the exact starting temperature of the water and the eggs, the ambient air pressure, and so on. But the most interesting fact I learned, which frankly had never occurred to me, is that (just like the white meat and dark meat of a turkey) the white and yolk of an egg cook at different rates, and therefore getting either of them to the desired consistency could have adverse effects on the other. Even self-timing eggs can’t address this problem.

The solution, apparently, is to cook the eggs at a much lower (i.e., lower-than-boiling) temperature for a significantly longer time—unfortunately a bit tricky given the equipment in most kitchens. But that’s if you want the egg to be utterly perfect and you’re extremely nitpicky. I’m not, and for the record, I hard-boil my own eggs following Alton Brown’s method:

1. Cover eggs with cold water
2. Heat to boiling
3. Cover pan, remove from heat, wait 12 minutes
4. Peel immediately under cold running water

Update: Erik Fooladi at Science- and Fooducation has a marvelous post on the topic: “Opposite-boiled eggs” – Cooking an egg with soft white and firm yolk.

As far back as I can remember, green beans were high on my “yuck” list. Yucky green beans took either of two forms. First was boiled: even if they started out fresh (canned and frozen were more usual), by the time they hit the table they’d had all the life boiled out of them and were wimpy, soggy, and highly unappetizing. The other way was the green bean casserole that every American and Canadian has seen at countless picnics and potluck dinners: you know, the kind made with cream of mushroom soup and topped with French’s canned onion rings. Even the casserole couldn’t disguise the sogginess of the beans, and of course as a kid mushrooms and onions were also high on my “yuck” list, making the problem worse.

It wasn’t until I reached my mid-30s (honestly) that I began to discover that green beans could be heated in such a way that they remained crisp, and that when so prepared, were actually quite tasty. And so I’d have them in the occasional stir-fry or sometimes raw on a salad. They’d disappeared from my “yuck” list but I still didn’t have them very often.

That all changed with the November, 2005 issue of Cook’s Illustrated, which somehow managed to devote a full two-page spread to what must be the world’s simplest green bean recipe. This dish is so amazingly delicious that we generally have it at least once a week, and even French fries have got nothing on these beans. They’re so good that they’re now near the top of my “Yum” list.

The Recipe
It’s really so simple that it’s not even worth putting in recipe form. You take some fresh (must be fresh!) green beans and snap off the stem ends. Toss the beans lightly with olive oil and a little salt. Put them on a foil-covered baking sheet and bake at 450°F/230°C for 10 minutes. Swish them around a bit, trying to turn over as many as you can, and back in the oven for another 10–12. Eat.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention any quantities: it’s a highly adaptable and forgiving recipe. (And if you put on too little salt, you can always add more later.) The foil is key, though: for one thing, it keeps your baking sheet from getting gunked up with oil; for another, the shiny surface helps the beans get crisp without burning (at least not much—a little black is actually good).

By the way…personally, I still feel that the only valid food colors in a Thanksgiving dinner are shades of white, yellow, orange, red, and brown. However, if you must cook something green on Thanksgiving and your family isn’t pushing for the green bean casserole, consider giving these beans a try.

If you will indulge me for a moment, gentle reader, I’d like to spend a few paragraphs doing something relatively silly and perhaps even futile: reviewing a product that has already been redesigned and replaced. There’s a method to my madness, though, and I trust you will find some of my remarks about the Kenmore Toast 'N Wave instructive even if somewhat outdated.

About four years ago, Morgen and I moved from an apartment with a built-in microwave oven to one without, and consequently were in the market for a new microwave. Given that our new place had too little counter space, we thought the Kenmore Toast 'N Wave, which combines a microwave oven and a toaster in one relatively compact unit, might be an ideal choice. It was inexpensive and had all the features we thought we’d need, and though we obviously couldn’t test it in the store, we figured: how can anyone mess up a microwave oven or a toaster? The answer, it turns out, is: by combining them.

Allow me to enumerate the faults we’ve found in the design:

1. You can’t use the toaster and the microwave at the same time. (You’d be surprised how often that need arises.)
2. The toaster portion can handle thick slices (such as bagels) but not wide slices. It was designed to hold only sandwich bread-sized slices, and we never buy that shape of bread. We always buy wider loaves, whose slices have worked perfectly well in every other toaster—but not this one.
3. When your toast is done, the toaster beeps…and keeps on beeping for a very long time. (I haven’t timed it, but I reckon it’s about a minute.) It won’t stop until you open the toaster door. If you’re not available to grab the toast at the very instant the toaster thinks you should, it’ll pester you until you do. (The microwave, on the other hand, just beeps and then shuts up, as it should.)
4. The default darkness setting for the toast (5 on a scale of 1–10) makes toast so light you might has well have simply held it in front of a light bulb for a minute instead. That wouldn’t be so bad if a higher setting would stick from one slice to the next, but no: you have to readjust the darkness every single time.
5. The keypad with which you enter the amount of cooking time for the microwave has the buttons arranged in two rows (1–5 and 6–0), rather than the more common and sensible rectangular arrangement of a calculator (1 on the bottom) or telephone (1 on the top).
6. If you want to microwave something at other than full power, you must enter the cooking time first and then the power setting—never the other way around.

Yes, both microwave and toaster usually get the job done, despite these aggravations, but the point is that using this oven, especially the toaster part, is far more complicated and annoying than using a stand-alone device. And the complexity is needless: if the designers had given any consideration to the way the machine would be used, or done any real-world usability testing, they could have corrected every one of these issues.

Now then: I can see from photos of the current model that it has changed. The handle has a different shape, the controls are organized somewhat differently, and for all I know, any or all of the above issues may have been dealt with as well. Unfortunately, there’d be no way for me to know without trying out a newer model, and no way to do that without buying it. Unlike my computer or cell phone, I can’t download a firmware update or pop in a new chip to get new features; I’m stuck with what I got—and I have to guess whether even a new model would address my concerns. And yet, inexplicably, even before the redesign, the Toast 'N Wave won a design award! At the end of 2002, the Consumer Electronics Association named it the “Innovations 2003 Award Winner” in the Home Appliance category. Which shows that the CEA must also never have tried it out. Bah.

For what it’s worth, Samsung’s discontinued Toast & Bake Microwave featured not only microwave and toaster but toaster oven too. But it didn’t take off; perhaps Samsung discovered that separate appliances really do make more sense.

This one really has me scratching my head. Maybe I just don’t get something obvious, but regardless, I’m clearly outside the target market. What we have here is a table with a seamless, one piece surface, the middle portion of which heats up to become a grill, and in so doing, bows inward to prevent the juices from whatever you’re cooking from running all over the people seated at the table. Several different styles and sizes of the Cook-N-Dine are available.

Now, I can respect this from an engineering point of view, and even from an aesthetic point of view. I just can’t figure out how this makes practical sense, or who it makes sense for.

To my way of thinking, this is like a fondue set: Once in a long while, you’ll decide that it would be a cool thing to share a special meal with your friends that’s made right on the table. But would anyone seriously use something like this regularly?

Almost every meal I prepare has components that are made in a variety of ways—for example, one dish is boiled, another is baked, another is fried. Only very rarely would I make an entire meal where every single item is grilled. Moreover, with this table, I’d have to reach over (or around) plates and glasses to get to the work area: awkward and potentially messy.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like the idea of having a distinction between the cooking area and the eating area; I also like putting food on plates and taking it out to the table with a little bit of drama and mystery. But again, perhaps I’m just not seeing how this could change the way I cook and eat for the better.

There’s absolutely nothing practical about this, but you have to admire someone who goes to this much effort just to prove it can be done. Someone added 5 PCI cards to a PC, each with 6 USB ports, and used the power from all 30 of those ports to supply the power to heat a small grill. (Each USB port can supply, at most, 500 mA, which means that this little grill could theoretically draw up to 15 amps—not too shabby.)

(From Gizmodo; original page (in Japanese) at http://xe.bz/aho/24/.)