"hack" news and stories

When Alanna sent me a note to let me know about a Lifehacker post on making low-fat cupcakes, I knew I would have to give it a try out of sheer curiosity. After all, Lifehacker is not exactly a food oriented site and to take a break from their regularly scheduled content to mention cooking seemed to be a sign that their technique was worth trying. Notice that I said technique and not recipe.

These light cupcakes are sort of a food hack (or a diet hack) using two ingredients: cake mix and diet soda. If you're not curious, or are so put off by the ingredients that you don't want to hear how the cupcakes turned out, you may as well stop now. Otherwise, read on...

It started with a relatively simple question: how do you improve a breadbox? The answer is that you add a UV lighting system that suppresses the growth of mold, extending the shelf-life of a loaf of bread. This is a particularly neat feature if you by preservative-free loaves of sandwich bread that seem to go bad in only two days.

Installing the light into a reflective, brushed-steel breadbox was a relatively simple matter once you have all the necessary equipment (and if you like building things). But the moment of truth came when the modified breadbox was tested against an unmodified box. The breads in the non-UV box molded in 2 weeks; the UV breads did not mold (though they did eventually dry up after several weeks, by which point you should have eaten the bread). Success!

Total cost of the project: $65. Never having to throw away another half-uneaten loaf that turned moldy: priceless.

[via SciFi Tech]

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Food hacks can be simple or complex, and this miniature tabletop grill made with a USB hookup tends towards the complex end, however it is the perfect experiment for anyone who ever felt that their inability to have shabu shabu while typing was making their life less fulfilling. Found at the MAKEzine blog, the original device was documented on a Japanese website, so those of us who aren't fluent will have to trip through the translated instructions instead of the original version if we want to make our own. Apparently, the meat tasted of "just a little electronic part" but that seems like a small sacrifice for not having to get up to cook or eat.

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