Saturday afternoon, Scott and I hopped into the car and headed out to the King of Prussia mall (a strange name, to be sure) in suburban Philadelphia. He had been wanting to get out there ever since they opened a LEGO store in the mall earlier this month and we finally had a free afternoon in which to make the trip.

It was everything a LEGO store should be, with plenty of amazing models of towns, vehicles and many of the vessels from the Star Wars movies. There were also a number of kitchen-related goods, which delighted me to no end. In addition to the timer you see above (which I did end up buying), you can get LEGO salt and pepper shakers, baking pans, ice cube trays and popsicle molds. They'd make great gifts for cooking-inclined LEGO fans!

You know you told yourself you would use a permanent marker to label every jar, box, and package of food you opened with the date so you could remember. So you wouldn't accidentally forget. So you would not accidentally drink that soy milk you opened three weeks ago, even though it says on the box to drink it within five days.

You know you told yourself.

But who the hell besides Martha Stewart labels everything?!?!

Right. So the DaysAgo Digital Day Counter is perfect for us mere mortals. The little gadget attaches, either by suction or magnet, to anything, to let you know how many days have passed since. Since? Since whenever you turn it "on." Open that jar of mayonnaise, turn on the DaysAgo, and you'll know how long you have to make tuna salad sandwiches with it.

Then again, someone told me jarred mayonnaise lasts until kingdom come.

Pasta is easy to cook. All you have to do is open up a bag and pour as much as you want into salted, boiling water, bring it back up to a boil and wait until it is done. The tricky thing about pasta is cooking it to the right consistency.

Al dente, a firm but not hard texture with a small amount of "bite," is usually what is desired and is rarely achieved by following the instructions on the packaging. A more reliable method of cooking pasta is to let it boil for several minutes and then testing pieces of pasta at 30-60 second intervals until you reach your preferred consistency. For this to work, however, you have to stand over the stove the whole time, so another option, this time in the form of a gadget, might present the perfect solution. The Pasta Per'fect Timer is dropped into the pot along with your noodles and changes color according to the level of doneness of the pasta. It gives three indicators, from thin (angel hair) to thick (lasagna noodles) and it will only take a couple of batches before you find exactly the right level of donrness and can hit it every time.

Speaking of things staying good in the 'fridge, someone on FARK recently posted a link about Timestrips, "smart-labels" with built in timers that can count down days or weeks. The idea is that you slap one of these labels onto something open in your refrigerator, activate it and then have a better idea of how long it's been around. A dye inside the label creeps across at a consistent rate. As RealTechNews noted, the sniff check is probably all you'll ever need. Still, if for some reason you had a lot of different things to keep track of in your fridge, maybe something like this would help you keep your sanity. If that was the deciding factor of your sanity though, maybe you're the type of person that already has a neatly drawn chart with dates for what's in your icebox. At any rate, they're about $9 for a pack of 50.

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?