home

Luck! Prosperity! Harmony!

Janice | February 13, 2013 - 2:28 pm

[lucky feng shui cat]

Feng Shui is not just a collection of superstitions.
Feng shui is a system of aesthetics that adds up to a technique for living. Global businesses like McDonald’s and Disney are regularly guided by feng shui principles when they develop properties, and some U.S. cities have toyed with incorporating the techniques into their building codes. They know that when the elements of your environment are in harmony, and negative energy is deflected, there’s a flow of positive energy that brings balance and vitality to your life. Health, wealth, fertility, personal growth, and positive relationships will find you.

Feng shui in the kitchen.
The kitchen is an important room in both Eastern and Western cultures. It’s the most heavily trafficked room of the house, and the place most closely aligned with a household’s prosperity and well-being. Eating is critical to the entire cycle of health, humor, work, and family. It’s also entwined with the five natural elements—wood, fire, earth, metal, and water—that play a role in feng shui. The kitchen needs a little special attention.

Layout
Ideally, you shouldn’t be able to walk into your home and see the kitchen right off the bat. That would portend digestive and nutritional disorders because of all the coming and going. If your kitchen is visible from the entry you need to draw attention away from it by placing an eye-catching object or artwork in a different direction. The cook should been in command with a good vantage point. A cooking island is an excellent option.

The stove is all-important. It shouldn’t be under a window, face a bathroom, or be situated beneath a bathroom that’s on an upper floor. Rotate the burner you cook on to keep your wealth circulating. Empty the tea kettle when you’re done using it: since the stove is a fire element, water shouldn’t sit on the stove for long periods of time or it can dampen your passion for life. Microwave ovens are convenient but don’t lead to serenity.

Color
Reds, pinks, and purples overload a kitchen with fire and can lead to family squabbling at mealtime. You also don’t want to use too many water colors like deep blues or greens that will compete with the ever-present fire of the stove. White symbolizes purity and cleanliness, so it’s always a good choice. If there’s not a lot of natural air and light, non-fluorescent lighting and circulating fans will keep the positive energy moving. Crystals will further magnify and enhance this.

What’s sitting out?
Knives can cut the energy flow so they should never be in an open rack with the blades visible. A hanging rack of pots and pans can be overwhelming. If you have one, make sure it’s not directly above an area where you cook or eat. Fresh flowers bring uplifting energy to the kitchen. Dried flowers are not recommended. Best of all is a bowl of oranges for good luck— arrange nine of them together to bring the most power to the room.

Try to limit kitchen clutter. Unanchored objects disrupt the peace and they can drag you down with their extra weight, especially if you want to lose some weight of your own. Dieters will do best in a clutter-less kitchen. Keep counter tops clear and drawers and cupboards tidy. Don’t allow food to linger too long in your pantry or refrigerator—stale food will bring stale energy to your kitchen.

Trust your intuition.
You know when a place feels right. You might not be thinking about balance, harmony, and energy, but they’re there, and they’re best not left to chance.
Feng shui helps you get it right.

Posted in diversions, home | Leave a comment

Make Your Own Gin (no bathtub necessary)

Janice | February 11, 2013 - 1:33 pm

[image via The HomeMade Gin Kit]

Gin is just vodka with some added flavorings.
Sorry, gin aficionados, but it’s true. The gin might find itself retailing for a few times the vodka price in a handblown crystal bottle with a bejeweled stopper, but they both started life as the same, un-aged, flavorless, grain alcohol.

That’s why it’s so easy to make your own gin.Commercial gin producers start by distilling grain into the vodka-esque base. Most producers will put it through a second distillation to get the flavoring in there in vapor form, but some will simply flavor it and bottle it. That’s what you’re going to do, and it makes a perfectly respectable gin, especially since you get to flavor it to your liking.

Home distilling is illegal.
In fact it’s illegal in every single country in the world, with the sole exception of New Zealand. No worries though, because there’s plenty of inexpensive, already distilled, neutral-tasting alcohol to use as your base. In other words, you’re going to start with some cheap vodka.

The basic recipe is no more complicated than making tea. You soak juniper berries, coriander, and citrus peel in the vodka and strain them out when it’s flavored. A funnel and cheesecloth will do, although a Brita-type filter pitcher is even better (and as any budget-conscious cocktail lover knows, an initial run through the Brita does wonders for inferior vodka).

Premium gins are distinguished by subtle differences in their taste profiles—Tanqueray is pungent with juniper, Bombay Sapphire has a hint of licorice, Hendrick’s tastes like cucumbers—but the precise blend of spices and botanicals in each is usually a closely guarded secret. Homemade gin gives you license to experiment. You can spice it up with dried chiles and peppercorns; warm it with spices like star anise, cloves, and cinnamon sticks; and add herbal, fruit, or floral notes.

Aspiring mixologist types that don’t know where to start can buy a gin-making kit complete with a pre-mixed blend of spices, botanicals, flowers, and aromatics.
You can also find plenty of gin-making recipes and other resources at any of the social networks for cocktail enthusiasts like Imbibe, See My Drink, On the Bar, and eGullet’s Spirits & Cocktails Forum.
DIY G&T: Serious Eats has a recipe for homemade tonic water.

Posted in beer + wine + spirits, diversions, home | 1 Comment

Not Cooking in Our Really Nice Kitchens

Janice | November 27, 2012 - 2:51 pm

Julia Child in her pegboard kitchen

It’s an oft-told tale: acres of gleaming granite and stainless steel, a six-burner Viking range pumping out 30,000 BTUs of fire power, the 22-slot block of Japanese knives from a hot new bladesmith; and the dual door Sub-Zero is stocked with frozen pizza and Hot Pockets, red-boxed Stouffer’s, Trader Joe’s burritos, and pints of Ben & Jerry’s.
It’s not just an amusing anecdote. The more we spend on our kitchens, the less we cook in them.

According to Remodeling Magazine’s Cost Vs. Value report, the average cost of a midrange kitchen remodel in 2011-2012 was $57,494 while the average upscale project cost $110,938. Kitchen square footage has doubled over the last 30 years, giving ample space for high-end appliances and specialized cookware. We spend giddy hours online drooling over the design possibilities on display at Houzz and Pinterest, and are consumed by the choice of whisk from the 55 different shapes and sizes for sale at Sur la Table. We love everything about our kitchens, except we’re not so hot on the actual cooking.

For all that expense, we’re not cranking up the Viking very often. About half of our food spending is in restaurants; just 11% of Americans eat two hot, home-cooked meals a day. And cooking drops as income rises, so a mere 2.4% of households earning more than $120,000 have those two hot meals at home—and presumably these higher earners represent the households with the pricey remodels.

That home cooking ain’t what it used to be.
We spend just 27 minutes a day on food preparation— less time than it takes to watch an episode of Iron Chef America. Our entrées are prepared from scratch 59% of the time, down from 72% in the 1980′s. We’ve even decreased the number of ingredients per dish, from a 1980′s average of 4.4 to a current 3.4. Scarily, about 10% of adults use the microwave for virtually all of their cooking.

When it comes to your kitchen, are you looking or are you cooking?

Posted in appliances + gadgets, home | Leave a comment

Airbnb for Home Cooking

Janice | November 21, 2012 - 5:02 pm

It’s called the new sharing economy, collaborative consumption, the peer-to-peer marketplace.
The success of Airbnb cemented the intersection of online social networking, mobile technology, the DIY movement, and the heightened frugality of lingering economic uncertainties. If you want to borrow or rent someone’s apartment, bicycle, car, lawnmower, designer handbag, parking spot, or any number of random household goods, you can find a marketplace to do it. There’s also plenty to eat in the sharing economy.

There’s also plenty to eat in the sharing economy.
There are underground food markets—quasi-clandestine events that remake the traditional farmers market into a tribal gathering of would-be chefs, food entrepreneurs, and food adventurers; they are to the indie food world what a rave is to the music crowd. There are food swapping events, where no money changes hands but you bid with bags of your homemade granola for someone else’s jars of jam, home-brewed vanilla extract, or hand-rolled pasta. And there are businesses trying for a piece of the market like Feastly, that turns your home cooking and dining room table into a restaurant for the night, and Gobble, that sells and delivers your meals to local customers.

Food sharing is an idea whose time has come.
It’s recession friendly; it earns a little income for the cook, and is generally cheaper (and healthier) than store-bought or restaurant takeout. It suits our interest in alternative dining seen in the wave of food trucks and pop-up restaurants that’s been gaining steam in recent years. It also dovetails with the interest in artisan foods, providing a showcase for cooks and a platform for food entrepreneurs to build their customer base.

But is it legal?
Bear in mind that even Airbnb—which facilitates $500 million worth of transactions annually and has a company valuation of $1.3 billion—stands on shaky legal ground. If you are a renter listing your home on Airbnb you’re probably violating your lease; if you own, you’re probably breaking zoning and other laws for operating an unlicensed inn.

The standard rule in most of the U.S. is that if you bake some cookies in your kitchen, you’re welcome to share them with friends, family, and neighbors; you can bring the cookies in to work to share with coworkers; you can exchange them at swaps and potlucks. But unless your home kitchen is commercially licensed, what you typically can’t do with your cookies is sell them for money. Some local authorities turn a blind eye to blatant violations like underground markets, while others crack down on even the most benign sales, resulting in incidents like St. Cecelia’s pie-gate, when a Pennsylvania state health inspector shut down three elderly, pie-baking church ladies at a lenten fish fry.

State and local legislatures are being prodded to loosen up regulations, especially when it comes to low-risk foods like fruits jams and baked goods. More than half of the states have so-called cottage food laws governing home food production, and a few more have laws pending, but individual cities, towns, and counties can add their own layers of bureaucracy and regulations.

Before you sell, consult the state law database at The Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Posted in community, food policy, home | Leave a comment

Low-Tech Fixes in a High-Tech World

Janice | October 2, 2012 - 2:42 pm

Rocket scientist apron via Zazzle

There are plenty of little home remedies for jump-starting balky gadgets.
There’s the blow dryer technique to warm the ink in an old toner cartridge to get it flowing; or the register at the supermarket checkout that only works when the cashier wraps the credit card in a plastic bag. My personal favorite is the trick where you use your head as an antenna: let’s say you’re pushing the button but you’re out of remote range for your car door opener. Touch the metal part of the key fob to your chin, hit the button again, and this time you’ve got it.

Nothing tops the kitchen when it comes to tech support.
It’s a treasure trove of fix-it potential. There’s wood and metal; things that cool and things that heat; hard surfaces and soft; sticky and smooth. Combine a little patience with some ingenuity and a well-stocked pantry, and look what you can accomplish.

resized

Boost your home Wi-Fi
Most home routers project the signal in a circle. But most routers sit near the wall where the connection comes in to your home. That means that half of its signal is drifting outside through the wall. A couple of cookie sheets or a semi-circle of foil will redirect the signal back into your house.

Keep your phone charged
Did you forget your cell phone charger again?
Put the phone in a cold place—the freezer compartment of the minibar fridge in your hotel room, or just a nice cold windowsill in wintertime. The cold will slow down the chemical processes inside the phone’s battery and extend the life of the charge.

New life for old iPods
Early generations of iPods were plagued by temperamental hard drives that would lose their alignment. We’d constantly power up and power down, give them a shake or a gentle smack. Sometimes it worked; most of us moved on to newer, more reliable models.
A night in the freezer might bring it back to life; the hard drive contracts from the cold, and more often than not it reseats itself properly as it thaws.

Safely fix scratchy disks (better than the method you use now)
CD and DVD lasers read data from a metal disk protected by a thin layer of plastic. When that top layer is scratched, a lot of people reach for an abrasive cleaner that makes the scratches shallower by rubbing off more plastic. Not the safest for data, but it works. Better still is a method that restores the protective layer: peel a banana and rub the fruit on the disk; then rub it in with the inside of the peel. Wipe away the excess and it’s indistinguishable (to you or to a laser) from the plastic coating.

Dry a wet cellphone
Studies tell us that one in three smartphone users bring their phones with them into the bathroom, and eventually, more than half of them will drop it into the toilet. Act fast and it might be resuscitated.
Take out the battery, wipe it all dry, inside and out, and put the phone and battery in a bowl of rice. It’s the same principle as a few grains of rice in a salt shaker—rice has a kind of magnetic attraction for water molecules and if you leave the phone in there overnight the rice will pull out all the moisture. As long as the battery didn’t get soaked, the phone should be fine, although considering where it’s been, a little cleaning might be in order.

Posted in gadgets, home, Science/Technology | Leave a comment

Shouldn’t Robots Be Serving Us Dinner By Now?

Janice | August 15, 2012 - 2:38 pm

(Rosie from The Jetsons; WA-7 from Dex’s Diner, Star Wars II Attack of the Clones; robot Woody Allen from Sleeper; Mr. Waiter concept design)

Where are our kitchen robots?
From Isaac Asimov to The Stepford Wives, there’s been the fantasy of an anthropomorphized household domestic to make our lives easier.
Then last week we watched while a robot performed a daring, elaborate landing sequence that put us on Mars. Since then the Mars Rover has been scoping out the planet and sending pictures and status updates from its own Twitter account (@MarsCuriosity).
I’m just looking for a little help around the house. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Here in the U.S. we’ve kind of stalled at the Roomba vacuum and the dancing robot mouse at Chuck E. Cheese. There is far more enthusiasm for the kitchen robot concept in Asia.

Harbin, China’s Haohai Robot Restaurant has 18 robot waiters and cooks that perform nearly every task in the restaurant. Most are single purpose: there are dumpling bots and noodle bots, a host bot that greets and seats, and a bot that scrubs the pots. Each can work a five hour shift on a single battery charge.

It takes just two robots to run FuA-Men Restaurant in Nagoya, Japan. But then again, the menu has just one item—a bowl of ramen in pork broth. Named for its Fully Automated Men, the owner claims that it’s a perfect bowl every time because of the robots’ “accuracy of timing in boiling noodles, precise movements in adding toppings and consistency of the taste and temperature of the soup.”

At the MK Restaurant chain in Thailand, about a dozen of the franchise owners opted to staff their restaurants with Yumbo. The Linux-based robot simulates a young teenager with an after-school job; he’s shorter than average with a youthful voice and big bright eyes on a video screen head. He carries trays of food from the kitchen and buses tables afterward.

The Dalu Robot Restaurant in China’s Shandong province didn’t need a traditional serving staff but just a delivery system to get the raw food to the tables. It’s a hot pot eatery where diners select their ingredients and cook their own meals by dipping various vegetables and meats into pots of broth, oil, and chilis. The robots, which resemble a gold-plated Klaatu from ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ circulate through the dining room on bicycle-powered food carts, pausing for deliveries when diners flag them down.

A robot in every kitchen? If these restaurants are any indication, I’d say not so soon.
At this point, robots are no different than bread makers and pasta machines—nice to have, but they’re still just the one-trick ponies of the kitchen. Like all too many appliances and gadgets, they’re uni-taskers. I’m sure electric crepe pans and strawberry hullers have their devoted fans, and they make perfect sense for a restaurant with strawberry crepes on the menu, but they have no business squandering space in most people’s kitchens.

Give me a humanoid version of the smartphone and an app store stocked with dishwashing, table setting, and onion chopping. Then we can talk.
Until then, I’ll stick with my Twitter relationship with the Mars Rover.

Posted in appliances + gadgets, home, Science/Technology | Leave a comment

Things to Do (and one thing not to do) with Kool-Aid

Janice | July 13, 2012 - 12:13 pm

Look at all the things you can do with Kool-Aid:

You can make lip gloss
It takes just a little Vaseline, a little honey, and enough Kool-Aid to get the right shade.

Clean a toilet
Lemon and orange flavors only; it’s cheap, environmentally friendly, and pet-safe.

Mix up some Play Dough
Kool-Aid dough smells so much better than the old nursery school salt dough.

Dye your hair
You can go for all-over color, tips and highlights, or make corrections to your existing shade. Berry and fruit punch flavors perk up red hair, and blue raspberry tones down brassy yellows. It’s subtle and temporary—it washes out after a few shampoos.

It’s an after-swim hair conditioner.
When your hair looks and feels like straw from the chlorine in a swimming pool, mix a little Kool-Aid into your shampoo. It removes the chlorine and gets rid of greenish ‘swimmer’s hair.’

You can tie dye a shirt

Clean your dishwasher
Run the dishwasher with a pack or two of Kool-Aid in the soap drawer and it washes away spots and residue and lime or iron build-up.

Paint your walls with Kool-Aid
Pick any flavor to tint a can of water-based latex paint.

Clean your driveway
A little Kool-Aid in the water removes rust and oil stains.

Kool-Aid is so very versatile.
Kool-Aid creates such pretty colors because it contains negatively-charged, anionic acid dyes.
As a household cleaner, it has the cleansing power of caustic and toxic substances like phosphates, petroleum, bleach, and oxalic acid.

There’s a lot you can do with Kool-Aid, but one thing you don’t want to do is drink it.

Posted in food knowledge, home | 3 Comments

Intermarriage and the Price of Skirt Steak

Janice | May 15, 2012 - 2:42 pm

image via Meat Sections

One in seven marriages in the United States is between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another.
That was the big news earlier this year when the Pew Research Center released its Social and Demographic Trends Report, a giant, once-a-decade, number-crunching project based on data from the 2010 U.S. Census. Of course anyone who’s shopped for skirt steak already knew this.

All those multicultural households means that more than a third of Americans can claim a family member, by marriage, of a different ethnicity or race. More and more Americans are sharing the cultures, customs, and especially the cuisines of a variety of racial and ethnic traditions. According to the Mintel marketing group, in a given month 63% of American households will have cooked Mexican food, 46% have cooked Chinese, and another 29% are fusion cooks. And a lot of those households seem to be cooking skirt steak.

For years, skirt steak lived in relative obscurity, ignored by America’s traditional home cooks. It’s a humble and homely cut that’s positioned on a cow between the flank and the brisket, and it basically acts like a girdle holding in those other belly parts. It’s coarsely-grained and chewy, but long marinating, quick cooking, and thin slicing reveals its distinctly juicy, decidedly tasty charms.

Until the 1980′s, skirt steak was priced below ground beef, and still butchers couldn’t give it away. Too tough and tendon-y to grind up for hamburger, most skirt steak ended up as dog food.

Then fajitas happened.
And Chinese stir-fries, Japanese negimaki, Korean bulgogi, and Brazilian churrasco. This flavorful, marbled steak proved to be the ideal cut for a multitude of robust, ethnic preparations. Its popularity skyrocketed, fueled by the surging multiculturalism. Today the skirt steak is the second most expensive cut of beef at the wholesale level, with only the tenderloin costing more. It’s worth every penny.

Learn the ins and outs of shopping, prepping, cooking, and serving this (now) all-American cut:
Serious Eats has a skirt steak how-to guide (sponsored by the Texas Beef Council), and you’ll find more recipes and tips at The Art of Manliness.

Posted in cooking, food trends, home | Leave a comment

In Pursuit of Imperfection

Janice | March 19, 2012 - 1:22 pm

image via MissOmniMedia

There’s a show on the Food Network in Canada called Dinner Party Wars:

Dinner Party Wars invites you to enjoy a deliciously hilarious hour of wining, dining and undermining as three couples go head to head in a ruthless, no-holds-barred dinner party competition. Hidden cameras capture every detail as testy guests come to blows and taste buds are either tickled or tortured.

A Canadian chef and a British etiquette expert serve as arbiters of taste and style by mocking, critiquing, and choosing an eventual winner from competitions like Gnocchi Knockdown and Chicken Bingo.

This is home entertaining as a full contact sport.
It’s soulless competition, a manifestation of our over-heated pursuit of foodie trophies that has turned dining into an emblem of status and lifestyle. And it’s a far cry from the simple pleasures of sharing a hand-crafted meal with friends.

It’s easy to see where we lost our way.
It started with Martha—the one we love to hate and hate to love. Martha Stewart taught us to sweat the details with her asparagus bundles braided with strands of chive. She instilled in us her mania for perfection and armed us with stencils, X-acto knives, and a carpenter’s level to decorate cookies.

Then the foodies took over. We learned to critique every morsel, abandoning genuine gustatory pleasures as we vet the preparation and provenance of each locally-grown, artisan-crafted, bee-friendly bite. Entertaining is fraught with political correctness and one-upmanship knowing that you’ll be drummed out of polite society if you serve the wrong coffee.

Dinner party perfection should be at most aspirational. We shouldn’t expect to reproduce the slick pages of Bon Appetit or Martha Stewart Living any more than a reader of Playboy expects to date a Playmate.
And in any case there’s always a lot of air-brushing going on.

Our current favorite antidote to dinner host anxiety is Kinfolk.
The magazine, online journal, iPad app, and monthly dinner series celebrate the soul of the dinner party. It’s about artistry, yes, but it’s scaled back to a simple elegance. Like the other publications, you’ll find recipes, table settings, and shopping resources, but it’s more inspirational than instructional. There’s nothing super-human about any of it. Feet on the ground, sleeves rolled up, and you’ll get there by dinner time.

Posted in cook + dine, food trends, home | Leave a comment

Would You Trade Your McMansion for a Cup of Coffee?

Janice | February 9, 2012 - 10:36 am

How’s this for a cultural shift: most Americans would forgo square footage for a house near a Starbucks.
For generations of strivers a big house was one of the most important emblems of status, a four bedroom jacuzzi-tubbed signpost along the roadway to success. The Jeffersons were movin’ on up; the Clampetts got their Beverly Hills mansion with a ce-ment pond in back. Now, it seems, you’re a nobody if you can’t walk out the front door and get a latte.

According to the Community Preference Survey conducted by the National Association of Realtors, 77% of Americans say that walkability is an important factor in their housing decision, and they prefer nearby restaurants over schools, churches, parks, and movie theaters. 88% say that they would choose a smaller home in a neighborhood with nearby amenities over a larger home where they have to drive everywhere.

If you’ve ever lived in a highly walkable neighborhood, you already know what a beautiful thing it is. It gives you convenient access to the daily destinations of life. If you’re lucky, you can walk to school or work. If you’re even luckier, there are groceries, a decent bakery, and the all-important cup of coffee within walking distance.

A premium coffee vendor is no small thing to a neighborhood. It speaks to the area’s economic and cultural vitality; it signals that the neighborhood has arrived. A successful cafe can add to a neighborhood’s momentum, drawing in more businesses and raising property values, an upswing cycle that realtors and civic associations refer to as the ‘Starbucks Effect.’

You can learn the walkability rating of any home or business. Walk Score calculates a score from 0–100 for any address— 100 is a Walker’s Paradise and 0 is totally Car Dependent. The algorithm assigns points based on the nearby amenities, as well as factors like cul de sacs (not a walk-friendly feature) and block lengths (shorter is better). A car-free lifestyle becomes possible with a score upward of 80.

Check your Walk Score and see how it matches up against some of these well-known residences:

The Obama’s former Chicago home has a middling Walk Score of 71. The move to the White House got them into a home with the very robust score of 97.

The Brady Bunch ranch house had a Walk Score of 74; very respectable for the San Fernando Valley.

Monica’s lower Manhattan apartment on Friends scores an unbeatable 100 points.

Posted in community, home | Tagged diversions, green | Leave a comment

The Coolest Kitchen from the International Consumer Electronics Show

Janice | January 19, 2012 - 10:05 am

Jetsons via Hanna-Barbera

The toasters really did tweet at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
The ovens downloaded recipes, the refrigerators were on Facebook, and the dishwashers chatted with the washing machines about the hot water.
The kitchen of the future is here, and can be summed up in one word: connected.
You talk to your appliances, they communicate with each other and the outside world.

The LG ThinQ refrigerator has a smart food monitor that texts you updates when you run out of groceries. It recognizes each family member through voice-recognition software and suggests dishes appropriate to each diet. The refrigerator can cue the ThinQ oven to the appropriate cooking time and temperature, and the oven will text you when it’s preheated and completed the cooking cycle.

The app-enabled Samsung refrigerator tracks the expiration dates of groceries and will soon be upgraded with an e-commerce app that will allow you to shop for food straight from a screen on the front of the fridge. For now, the LCD monitor can be used to stream TV and Facebook or download recipes.

You can ring up the internet-connected Jura-Capresso coffeemaker from your smartphone to start brewing before you even get out of bed. It stores individual preferences for coffee strength, water amount, temperature, and milk-frothing steam.

There are features to appeal to the tech-geek inside us, but the real smartness of the appliances fits into the broader conversation around the connected home and overall home management. Connected appliances can minimize down-time and waste by running their own performance diagnostics, and they can connect to the manufacturer for repairs and upgrades. They can tap into signals from power companies and use the data to adapt their cycles to optimize energy usage and shift their energy consumption to off-peak times.

Smarten up your old appliances.
There are devices out there that let you create your own connected home without replacing your old appliances.

The Wifi-connected Twine is loaded with temperature, pressure, moisture, current, RFID, and motion sensors. It knows when the refrigerator door is opened and closed, when the ice maker is jammed, and when your oven thermostat needs recalibration; and it can report on status via emails and tweets.

Remember the Clapper? Belkin’s WeMo is the 21st century version of ‘clap on, clap off.’ You plug in any appliance that has an on-off switch and control or schedule its operations via smartphone or tablet computer.

The connected home is not exactly the futuristic utopia of The Jetsons, where a hungry Jane pushes a few buttons on the food-a-rac-a-cycle and there’s dinner for four. But we’re getting closer.

Posted in appliances + gadgets, home, Science/Technology | Tagged appliances + gadgets, kitchen, technology | Leave a comment

Snooping in Other People’s Pantries

Janice | January 17, 2012 - 10:40 am

Almedahls vintage pantry tea towel

It’s been said that the eyes are the window to the soul.
Nonsense. The true window to the soul is the pantry.

Every pantry tells a story.

Pantries are as individual as fingerprints. They reflect history and aspirations, politics and pocketbooks. They are links to the past and road maps to our dreams. They are the show we put on for guests and they can harbor our deepest secrets.

Pantries can be treasure troves of exotica or wastelands of deprivation. They can speak of careful planning or organized chaos. They can remind us that we are overscheduled or underpaid. And sometimes they just scream Take out the recycling!

Pantries are the place where dreams meet reality.

The online world is ripe with opportunities for a culinary peeping Tom. The best of these is a photo series, now in its fith year, called Other People’s Pantries.

Hosted on the blog The Perfect Pantry, each week a different guest blogger showcases their own pantry in photographs and text. We have peered inside of converted broom closets in tiny urban kitchens, hand-hewn shelving in log cabins, and lavishly outfitted pantry extravaganzas in grandiose homes. We have been to kitchens in nearly every state and about a dozen countries. Can by can, spice by spice, each pantry tells the story of a cook, a home, a life.

If you’re game, Other People’s Pantries is currently soliciting submissions for new pantries to feature.

Want to snoop some more?

Diane Sawyer prefers Miracle Whip to mayonnaise. Bobby Flay like to mix hot sauce into his Greek yogurt. Rachel Ray bakes with cake mixes. Celebrity secrets are revealed in Stock Your Pantry Like the Stars.

A dieting wife and mother; a restaurant critic; a 20-something ethical vegetarian; a newly-divorced middle-aged man; the Montreal Gazette dissects the shopping and eating habits of this eclectic group of home cooks in its series Shop, Cook, Eat, Drink.

What Your Groceries Say About You looks at the secret language of grocery purchases, from Jimmy Dean’s dough-wrapped frozen sausages (“I will eat anything on a stick,”) to canned Reddi Whip (“There’s an 87% chance I’m using this for sex.”)

Posted in diversions, home | Tagged kitchen, supermarkets | Leave a comment

The New Recyclables

Janice | November 10, 2011 - 12:41 pm

image via Living, etc.

Yogurt containers into toothbrushes, Cheetos bags into CD cases.

While you were dutifully rinsing out tuna cans and bundling newspapers, recycling kept moving forward.

Specialized recyclers have sprung up to handle everything imaginable— or unimaginable in some cases: broken crayons, used dentures, old sports trophies, even sex toys. The kitchen is particularly fertile ground for recycling. Following are kitchen items that you’ll probably be surprised to learn are recyclable.

Hershey’s Kisses
Those little bitty foil wrappers sure add up. Around 80 million chocolate Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped every day. That’s enough aluminum foil to cover nearly 40 football fields. Instead of tossing it out, toss it into the bin with aluminum cans.

Corks
We like our chocolate and our wine. 13 billion natural wine corks are sold each year. Get mailing instructions or find a local cork drop-off location on the websites for recyclers ReCORK and Yemm & Hart. Used corks can find new life as placemats, shoe footbeds, flooring, and other building materials.

Cooking oil
I hope you know not to pour used cooking oil down the drain. It’s the number one cause of clogs, so clearly a lot of people are pouring it out. Whatever you’ve been doing, you might be surprised to learn that your used oil can be recycled into biofuel. Check Earth911 for a nearby recycling location.

Packaging and more
Terracycle accepts the previously non-recyclable and turns them into products like clipboards and backpacks. Terracycle accepts:

Drink pouches (like Capri Sun) and single-brew coffee pouches (like Flavia)
Single-serve treat packaging (granola bars, cookie, gum, and candy bar wrappers)
Lunch kits (like Lunchables)
Chip bags
diapers
toothpaste tubes
small electronics

Produce stickers
Barry Snyder doesn’t recycle but will upcycle all those little stickers that come on supermarket produce, turning them into mosaic homages to well-known works of art. Visit Stickerman Produce Art to check out his work and for sticker shipping details.

Kitchen appliances
Remodeling a kitchen, or even just replacing the old toaster— use the Steel Recycling Institute’s location finder to pass along old appliances large and small.

If your unwanted items still have some life in them, get them into the hands of people who can use them. Sell them or offer them up as giveaways on Freecycle, Craigslist, Throwplace, and iReuse.com.

Posted in home, sustainability | Tagged green, kitchen | Leave a comment

Luck! Prosperity! Harmony! Feng Shui Your Kitchen

Janice | April 16, 2010 - 12:30 pm

Feng Shui is not just a collection of superstitions.

Feng shui is a scientific system of aesthetics that adds up to a technique for living. Global businesses like McDonald’s and Disney are regularly guided by feng shui principles when they develop properties. Some U.S. cities have toyed with incorporating the techniques into their building codes.

When the elements of your environment (wood, water, metal, earth, fire) are in harmony, and negative energy is deflected, there is a flow of positive energy that brings balance and vitality to your life. Practitioners believe that health, wealth, fertility, personal growth, and positive relationships come to those living within a harmonious environment. [...]

Posted in appliances + gadgets, home | Tagged appliances + gadgets, feng shui, kitchen | Leave a comment

Backyard Goats? Think long and hard.

Janice | April 9, 2010 - 11:47 am

Suburban goat-keeping is the latest topic to get the Dummies treatment from the popular series of how-to books. It’s a sure sign that backyard goats have reached critical mass.

This time last year it was chickens. Stories in the press fueled a nostalgia-tinged notion of endearing, pet-like creatures, deliciously fresh eggs, and serious locavore status. The dream ran up against the reality of filthy, shrieking fowl that barely edge out snakes in cuddliness, and are prone to ailments like poultry mites and pasty butt. Egg dreams were dashed by fragile hen health and the surprise of chicks that matured into roosters. Animal shelters around the country are overflowing with last year’s fad. [...]

Posted in food trends, home, local foods | Tagged agriculture, cheese, local | 9 Comments

Pantry Peeping

Janice | February 18, 2010 - 11:59 am

                 Almedals pantry tea towel via Huset
.

It’s been said that the eyes are the window to the soul.

Nonsense. The true window to the soul is the pantry. [...]

Posted in home | Tagged diversions, kitchen | 2 Comments

Gigabiting

Where Food Meets Culture & Technology