Find tech advice for business hereIf you think the most you can do with a microwave is bake a potato or two, think again. Panasonic just announced a new collaboration with The Culinary Institute of America (CIA). What does this collaboration mean for you? Oh, only that some of the best chefs in the country will develop no-fuss gourmet recipes for cooking with Panasonic microwaves, as well as create key microwave-cooking technique videos that will be hosted on Panasonic's microwave Virtual Test Kitchen Web site.
(Credit:
Panasonic)
The recipes are designed to be affordable, easy, and quick to prepare, with broad appeal. The CIA will also conduct complete nutritional analysis with dietary information for each recipe, so you'll know exactly what you're getting with each one.
The recipes are specially formulated to take advantage of Panasonic's Inverter technology, which allows for more even cooking by providing an an always-on, constant energy flow at variable intensities. Consistent and precise heat means more control over cooking, reheating, and defrosting with uniform results and no overcooked edges.
Make your microwave do more than reheat last night's leftovers. Put it to work and let it make you an all-new dinner tonight.
One at a time, please.
(Credit: Harriet Carter)Super Bowl week continues, and whether or not you watch the game for the commercials or the actual game, most likely you will tune in. Even more likely is that you will find yourself in a room full of different snacks and treats of varying degrees of healthiness. My advice is to steer clear of the chopped celery, carrots and cauliflower (those will just get smothered in a dressing anyways) and go for the good stuff. Chances are pretty good that somewhere on the spread is a pile of chicken wings.
The perennial football favorite, chicken wings are personal, portable, and (usually) delicious. No matter if you like 'em spicy or mild, somebody has got to cook them, so why not take matters into your own hands with the Chicken Rack from Harriet Carter?
Perfect for wings, the rack can be used in the oven or on the grill. After cooking, it can even be used as a serving tray or display stand (a good way to keep your guests from grabbing too many at a time). The distinctive shape places up to 12 wings (or legs) in such a way that the fat drips away from the chicken while cooking. No turning is necessary, which means more time for watching the game--or fiddling about with your 3D glasses for better commercial viewing.
I've been cooking long enough to build up a substantial archive of tried-and-true recipes, but for some reason, I've never found a way to organize them. I'll find one that works and file it away with every intention of using it again, but I'll either forget that it's there or I'll get frustrated rifling through the piles of magazine clippings.
At some point I attempted to solve the problem by starting a recipe book. I soon learned, however, that the dedication required to keep a recipe book is just about as much as the dedication to learn how to cook in the first place. Plus, when it was all said and done, I wasn't any more organized than I had been when I started out. I still had the same system as my folder full of magazine clippings, only my book was harder to read and didn't have any pretty pictures. Since then, I've had trouble keeping track of the good recipes that I've tried, and in most cases, have just thrown them out with the intention of looking them up as needed.
So if writing recipes down doesn't work, and neither does saving clippings, the next logical step is to follow the trend in areas like communication, shopping, and bill-paying: computerize them!
There are other recipe managers available, but the Recipe Manager seems to take the cake (no pun intended). Winner of Best in Show at Macworld, the software provides a simple way to archive a huge collection of recipes, including ones that you make yourself and those you find elsewhere.
You can create your own cookbooks from your recipe collection and e-mail them to friends and family, as well as track your weight, food intake, and blood pressure. If you don't want to rely on old family stand-bys, you can import recipes.
The Recipe Manager also gives you the planning power to schedule meals well in advance, using a built-in calendar. You can also automatically populate shopping lists that can be exported to your iPod.
If you're the kind of person who prefers the handwritten variety of cookbook, then I celebrate your commitment to writing your favorites down. For those who can't seem to find the time, I'm thankful that there's a program that lets us digitize recipes.
The house I live in now is truly my dream home, and a lot of that is thanks to the kitchen. We're lucky enough to have a semiopen floor plan: our spacious kitchen opens into the family room; a swinging door separates the kitchen from the formal dining room. So the kitchen is truly the heart of our home, the place where we gather with friends and cook while the kids play nearby.
I think of the kitchen as mission control in our house, and AT&T's HomeManager device could be a smart addition to our central command. HomeManager integrates an ordinary cordless phone (an essential kitchen gadget in its own right!) with a cordless touch-screen device that offers information and organization in a slick package.
The 7-inch color display lets you access a shared address book, calendar, call logs (so you can keep tabs on the teens), visual voice mail, Internet news, weather, and recipes. This kind of device is exactly what you want when you're putting dinner together while the kids do homework--you don't want to kick someone off the computer or leave the room for your laptop to look up a quick recipe for sesame noodles. Just pull it up on HomeManager and keep things moving.
Imagine a kitchen calendar that's cool enough to encourage your kids to actually write things down. I have goose bumps. Plus, you can store your digital photos on the device for a slide show display when you're not using it. It's a pricey piece, at about $300, but if you use AT&T's other services, HomeManager may be a nice addition to your kitchen.
The KitchenAttendant is a touch screen that takes the guesswork out of keeping your kitchen's inventory, making recipes, and watching your diet.
(Credit: Digital Trends)Technological advances like the ones you see on this blog are making cooking, eating, and entertaining easier and more convenient, but in the case of some inventions, like the KitchenAttendant, we're no longer faced with the responsibility of thinking about what we should eat.
Remember the Intelliscanner Kitchen Companion remote, a handheld scanner that keeps track of your pantry and helps you print out grocery lists? Meet a device that puts the runt remote to shame. The KitchenAttendant is a countertop computer kiosk that was developed as an inventory-tracking device and cooking aid and has so many culinary bells and whistles that it will make you feel as if your job as meal-maker has become obsolete.
The touch-screen device fits on top of your kitchen counter and has revolutionized food tracking by being the first system that links together your kitchen inventory to both actual stores and health management information. This means that in addition to tracking the items in your cupboards with a bar-code scanner similar to the Intelliscanner, it also sends recipes, coupons, shows you video demonstrations of recipes, and tells you what items you still need in order to make dinner.
According to KitchenAttendant LLC, the system's installation and hardware costs should be covered by supermarket companies, while the consumer will have to pay a small monthly fee (about $16.00). By connecting directly with supermarkets, the system can display what you bought as soon as you get back from the store, as well as display a list of possible recipes that you can make with your current inventory and then transfer "used" items that you've scanned out onto the next grocery list.
Also, let's say that you made a casserole for your family and you ended up throwing half of the recipe away. Next time you make it, the KitchenAttendant will suggest a half-sized recipe for casserole and do the calculations for you (it's not hard to imagine the collective cries of protests about this coming from middle-school math teachers).
The countertop computer can also be used as a health management tool: it can warn you if one of the members of your family is allergic to an item in your pantry and will display recipes accordingly, and can also make recipe suggestions if you have strict weight loss or dietary needs (for example, if you're diabetic).
Got some stuff sitting in your pantry that's been there a little too long? The expiration date is just around the corner, and you want to cook something new that doesn't require going to the store? Lucky for you there's SuperCook, a service that lets you figure out things to eat based on what you've got. Unlike some other services that do this, SuperCook separates the wheat from the chaff (poor choice of phrases I know) by showing you the recipes you can make with what's in your kitchen, and those that require a few extra items to match up with their original recipe.
Let SuperCook know what's in your kitchen, and it'll do the rest.
(Credit: CNET Networks)To add items to your virtual kitchen, you can simply start typing names in. SuperCook's got a suggest-as-you-type feature that makes it pretty simple to add a lot of items quickly like you would with tags on Flickr. Once they've been added they stay there until you remove them, meaning you can come back to the site later on and make a few adjustments to get updated recipes. This is especially helpful with spices, as a few added or missing ones can change hundreds of recipes at a time. Users who sign up can get their kitchens permanently saved, along with the option to bookmark recipes they like.
In addition to its recipe recommendation by ingredient service, SuperCook gives you Amazon.com-like recommendations for other ingredients you should pick up based on what you've got laying about. What's interesting here is that these recommended ingredients change based on what type of dish you're working on, as the service lets you cycle between entrees, starters, and deserts. It's also a super-simple way to stock up your virtual kitchen without having to type what's there.
I like this service already, but it's in a very crowded space. Other sites like Allrecipes, RecipeMatcher, Google Base (recipe version), and Snacksby have been around a little longer and offer similar functionality that most folks will be happy with. I still prefer SuperCook's virtual kitchen idea and ingredient recommendations, which I think make it more useful than most.
Amazon.com announced on Monday a new celebrity chef section of its Web site. The Celebrity Chef Blog will feature recipes and tips from celebrities including Dinner Impossible's Robert Irvine, Helen Chen, and Mollie Katzen, as well as gift suggestions from a handful of Amazon's section editors.
The blogs will have places for reader comments, too, so if Irvine's recipe for oyster stuffing isn't all he said it would be, you can let him know about it.
It's not the first time Amazon has used original content to spice up its product offerings. It launched blogs written by authors of some of the books it sells in 2005.
By now you've probably heard of Twitter, the popular messaging service that lets members broadcast short messages to friends and followers. Twitter's subscription price (free) makes it a prime candidate for broadcasting more than just personal updates, and the past few months have brought two food-related Twitter feeds to our attention. The first, foodrecalls, rolls an RSS feed of FDA food recalls--along with links to complete recall details--to its followers. It's a useful way for Twitter members to stay up to date on possible dangers lurking in their refrigerators. The second, cookbook, provides basic recipes in fewer than 140 characters (Twitter's upper limit for message length). Put together by Maureen Evans, the Twitter cookbook's basic bread, risotto, jam, and pastry recipes are a haiku-like exercise in minimalism and a refreshing return to simple home cooking.
Do you know of any other food-related Twitter feeds?
AOL and the Campbell Soup Company have teamed up to make the food section of AOL's Web site a little more enticing. A new section, launched today, is called "Dinner Tonight" and features a quick and easy recipe for each night of the week. Users can tab through to see the suggested recipes for the whole week. AOL will include more than 2,000 Campbell's recipes in that section. But don't assume it's all going to be chicken baked in a can of cream of mushroom soup. Recipes for this week also come from AllRecipes.com and EatingWell.
AOL plans to launch a second section, called "Play with Your Food," in November. That section will feature fun kitchen activities, articles, quizzes, food trivia, polls, and user-generated photo galleries and videos, according to the company's statement.
Souper.
Kristina Nielsen has a growing collection of recipes, culled from friends, family members, magazines, books, Web sites and the occasional food package label. She keeps some of them in a binder and some loosely shoved in a drawer; some are neatly printed, some hastily scribbled on notes. Others live online in her recipe boxes on various sites. Together they represent the culmination of the 10 years she's spent learning how to cook new dishes. Now, a company called TasteBook wants to take Kristina's recipe collection--and those of amateur chefs like her--into the 21st century.
A sample of a customized cookbook printed by TasteBook.
(Credit: TasteBook)TasteBook, which plans to launch Tuesday, hopes to create an easy way for people to find recipes and print out their own customized, hardcover cookbooks. A number of self-service publishing services like Blurb, Lulu and Xlibris already allow people to upload their own pictures and text and publish a hardcover book. TasteBook takes the basic idea of those services and caters the process specifically to making recipe books.
TasteBook has two key features: first, it simplifies searching for recipes online by indexing recipes from all over the Web into one list of search results. It then allows people to select recipes from those search results and print them out in a professional-looking cookbook.
At launch, the TasteBook site will include about 25,000 recipes from Epicurious, but the company plans to expand its service to include recipes from other sites beginning next year. People can automatically important their Epicurious recipe boxes and can also upload their own recipes and include them in the books they print.
For $34.95, a user can print a hardcover binder with handpicked cover art and up to 100 recipes with their own comments added. If all 100 recipes aren't used initially, TasteBook will issue credits for the remaining recipes, which can be printed out later and added to the binder or sent to friends.
To avoid copyright issues with the sites that publish recipes, TasteBook licenses recipes from their original publishers when they are printed out. And on TasteBook.com, users can see only previews of recipes. To view a recipe in its entirety, they have to click through to the original recipe site. In this way, TasteBook hopes to drive traffic back to those sites and focus more on recipe discovery and printing rather than getting into the business of creating recipes themselves.
Company co-founder Kamran Mohsenin likens the online interface to that of another bit of well-known software. "We're basically doing the iTunes model," Mohsenin said. "If you know how to use iTunes, you know how to use TasteBook." In addition to acting as an intermediary between consumers and content publishers, TasteBook has a service similar to iTunes Essentials, which are pre-compiled playlists users can browse and use to discover new artists and songs. TasteBook currently has about a dozen featured collections, such as kid-friendly or vegetarian recipes, that users can browse to get ideas.
TasteBook is launching simply, but the company has plans to expand in the coming year by forming new partnerships with other recipe sites, adding more featured recipe collections with various themes and authors and by supporting user-generated photos. They'll also be "turning up the social factor because (cooking is) a very social thing," Mohsenin said. But out of the gate, they're not attempting to become another social networking site.
The company was founded by two former employees of Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery)--Ofoto co-founder Mohsenin and former Chief Technical Architect Greg Schroeder. Don't be surprised to see them delve into other niches eventually. It's the dedication to a specific hobby that sets TasteBook apart from other types of publishing services that don't get involved in the content itself, Mohsenin said.
"We're creating a new category (of publishing), called the custom book. The idea is that we actually understand what 1 cup of milk means. So we can go to Chow or Epicurious and crawl and parse those recipes, and we can attach nutrition data because we understand what a recipe is," he said. That same TasteBook model could be applied to any number of do-it-yourself hobbies with a passionate user base with specialized knowledge and needs.
Update on October 24, 2007: TasteBook announced Tuesday night that it has received funding from CondeNet, publisher of Epicurious.com.
