The butter slicer we saw a couple of days ago might be helpful when you're baking and are trying to cut off just the right amount for your recipe, but its not the most practical tool to have around when you just want to butter your toast. The One Click Butter Cutter is somewhat unnecessary if you own a knife, but is a useful gadget in its own way, not to mention that it's fun to use. With the push of a button, it dispenses one standard "pat" of butter - slightly less than 2/3 tsp, so you get 5 pats per tablespoon of butter. You can store a stick of butter in the butter cutter in the refrigerator, so it is always ready to go.

The gadget could come in handy at breakfast or when you're cooking and need to grease the pan, just for sheer convenience. In addition, it is a great way to consistently use portion control with butter, since you know exactly how much you're going to get from each slice without having to measure it out yourself.

[via book of joe]

One piece in the New York Times' food section this week summed up a thought that has probably been on the minds of foodies since offal and rather less conventional cuts of meat became the "It"- foods of the last few years in fine dining. Namely, it put a voice to the sentiment that peasant food isn't simple if you aren't a peasant.

The writer explains her experiences cooking for her family, when she says they view just about anything that is made entirely from scratch with some degree of suspicion because it is unfamiliar. Cooking using some preprepared ingredients, like store-bought taco shells for tacos, seems simpler because it takes far less time to prepare than many "from scratch" dishes, especially when you consider you don't need to have spent any time developing a culinary foundation to use them. Everyone has taco shells at their local store. Tarte tatin, on the other hand, is not something that all people have ever eaten, let alone know how to make.

So is "simple" food stuff that is borne from necessity or does it consist of things that are easily and widely available? The answer is both and, to many, the answer is somewhere in between. Simple foods are those that seem uncomplicated to the chef who is preparing them, whether they take skill, experience or a trip to the store to make.

"Big soda" has been blamed for the obesity epidemic, but now they are trying to launch an even more insidious plan on the public: they want people to stop brewing coffee at home and buy prepacked, ready-made coffee drinks instead. And by "they", I mean Pepsi, the company that partners with Starbucks to put out bottled frappuccinos. Tracey Doucette, who runs the branch of the company that handles the partnership, said that their plan "is about converting users from the coffee form they have today to a new form that is ready to drink."

Many consumers welcome such a change, remarking that it would be faster and "less work."

The worst part of this is that studies have shown that consumers do not want to buy black coffee in a can, or coffee with minimal added sugar and cream. They want sugary "treats" - and by trying to make that the standard for coffee in the country, the companies really do seem to be promoting poor nutrition, in addition to the eradication of coffee as we know it.

Though it may seem as though the food processing industry is constantly trying to improve on nature, twisting it into new and more appealing forms, sometimes it turns out that they are not trying to improve on it as much as they are trying to help it compete with the ever growing range of packaged products. With consumers asking for more natural and more organic products, it would seem that they would turn back to old standbys, like nature's single-serving snack: the apple. The problem with the apple is that it is not as easy to eat as a bag of chips, there's a low "munchability" factor that would drive you to reach for more. Today's consumers are used to having a product go straight from the package to their mouth, without having to pick it apart - or bite off pieces a bit at a time. Packaging Nature's finest into a convenient, ready to eat form takes more work that you would think, despite the fact that apples come off the tree ready to eat. The New York Times Magazine did a great job chronicling the fascinating development of the prepackaged, non-browning apple slice. No longer will modern snackers have to contend with slicing, disposing of cores or trying to avoid the previously inevitable browning of their flesh because almost every store now carries the fruits, perfectly preserved and ready to finally be eaten.