"time" news and stories

TIME magazine recently featured a piece called "The Farm-to-Table Fetish," which profiles chef Dan Barber, of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and the movement that he and the restaurant/farm have come to embody. TIME's John Cloud follows Barber (right) out into the fields that produce much of the produce and meat that appear on Stone Barns' menu. One interesting detail is that the turkeys and Cornish chickens raised at Blue Hill are the same breast-heavy, fast-maturing varieties used by large-scale producers like Perdue. The birds raised at Blue Hill are pastured on grasses, however, as opposed to being penned and raised on grain and other feed. All in all, it's a pretty idyllic profile.

This quiz is from TIME magazine and it's a short one: only 6 questions. It's about eating smart and it actually covers a few interesting topics, with a bit of information to support each of the answers. Questions cover allergies, health and nutrition. Unlike some other quizzes, it doesn't intend to trick the person answering the questions!

The best part about quizzes is that we can all participate. I got 5 out of 6 when I took it, so take 2 minutes to click through the questions and post your scores in the comments section.

And has anyone tried Zsweet, which is mentioned in the last question? I've never seen it in stores, but according to their website, it's available at a handful of stores around the country.

Source

Some of you are no doubt familiar with the technique of cooking food on your car's engine while you drive. Perhaps you've even read Manifold Destiny. A great site called Instructables has a step-by-step guide with plenty of annotated photos showing how to make things like marinated chicken breasts, roasted potatoes, ramen noodles and apples with brown sugar. Mileage ranges and speeds are suggested, as is placement on different parts of the engine. The tutorial was posted by a mechanical engineering student who goes by Trebuchet03. He also adds that the striker plate inside your car door can double as a bottle opener in a pinch.

Time Magazine's website currently features more than a dozen food- and nutrition-related stories, all of which look to have been posted within the last few days. I'm unsure as to whether these articles are set to run in the June 12 edition, as the page's heading would imply, or if they're older pieces that are just now being posted online. At any rate, the articles range from "Six Rules for Eating Wisely," by Michael Pollan to a detailed narrative of how a dish makes its way to the Cheesecake Factory's menu. Other pieces focus on grass-fed beef, school lunches, the 100-mile diet and a list of some of the top food sites on the web. It's definitely worth a look.

I have a problem. The timer on my oven is broken. Truth be told, I'm relieved because it went out in a blaze of glory - by which I mean that it made its high pitched beeping sound for about 2 days straight. By unplugging the oven, I was able to shut it off temporarily that was only a temporary solution, as I still wanted to use the oven. Now that the timer has passed on and I still have a functional oven, I am forced to rely on a temporary timer until I buy a new one.

I saw on Apartment Therapy: Chicago, they had picked out a list of the top ten kitchen timers, including the Michael Graves Alessi(bottom left, above) for $29.50, the Eva Solo Magnetic (right, above) for $33 and an Old fashioned aluminum timer for $24.99. To be honest, even though the Alessi timers are cute, I don't like any of them. I need a digital timer with a good alarm and neither of their two digital picks (an Oxo and a Taylor) mentions anything about their alarms in their product descriptions.

Digital timers not only come with better alarms than dialed timers, but they're much more accurate in terms of the times you can set them for. You'll never have to approximate, like you do with dials. I'm currently leaning towards the Big Digit Kitchen Timer (top left, above) or the Bonjur Timer, based on alarm noises alone. Is there such a thing as a best timer? What timer do you use?