"kitchen tool" news and stories

We love salt and pepper shakers of all kinds here - after all, what would food be without seasonings? It would be boring. And while it doesn't hurt to have an interesting set of shakers on the table, there is such a thing as having ones that are too interesting. Creepy, even. These chicken feet salt and pepper shakers let you "shake a leg" in seasoning your food, but they still look like chicken feet and they might be disconcerting to see on the table. They're also $50 per pair, and at that price, I'd rather spend the money on some expensive salt than ceramic feet.

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Ever since I caught one of the Iron Chefs using a gadget like this on TV, I wanted one. The Clack Egg Cracker is a device that allows you to crack off one end of an egg-shell in a perfect circle. It gets its name from the loud "clack" it makes as it works. As you might imagine, it makes peeling boiled eggs significantly easier.

The show I first saw this on was one of the original Iron Chef episodes, not Iron Chef America, and the chef sliced a perfect circle of shell from a raw egg, not a boiled one, before using the empty shell as a serving dish. I tried to do the same thing myself, but a tool like this one would have done it in a fraction of the time. Granted, it may not be the most practical device, especially if your main purpose is to make Iron Chef-style serving dishes, but it's certainly a conversation piece. Priced at about $20, I might just be willing to invest for coolness alone.

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When I was little and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day to take in my lunch, I hated it when peanut butter would get in to the jar with the jam, or vice versa. I also didn't want to have to wipe off or wash the knife halfway through making my sandwich because it seemed inefficient and, to maximize my sleeping time, I wanted a fast sandwich. As a result, I tried to use the exact amount of peanut butter or jelly, so as to have none left on the knife. At 8 years old, I thought this seemed pretty clever, but  having one of these dual-sided peanut butter and jelly spreaders would have solved my problems completely. The color-coded sides enable you to dip to your heart's content without mixing the contents of the jars. They're $11.99 and, to justify the expense on the silicone kitchen tool, you can use them for anything from buttering toast to spreading frosting on cupcakes.

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I think the market for these is people who love odd kitchen tools and people who are, at least occasionally, too lazy to use two separate measuring cups when cooking. This really unusual set of Odd-Sized Measuring Cups measure 2/3 cup, ¾ cup and 1½ cups, conveniently eliminating the need to do any math the next time you are doing any baking. I'm sure that I would use them if I had a set, particularly because these are very common measurements, but I am not sure that I would buy them for myself. If they were a gift, though....