"utensils" news and stories

Bored with your kitchen?

Don't fear. As you look for new ways to make cooking special, and also as the gift-giving season approaches, we have found you eight bizarre kitchen items from ThinkGeek! From the futuristic to the just-plain-weird, these items will certainly give you a smile.

And who knows? Some of these are pretty clever. Maybe you need a Titanium Spork!

1. The Titanium Spork: Lightweight, shovels a lot of food.
2. Squishy Bowls: A 16 oz bowl that can fit in your pocket!
3. All Edges Brownie Pan: For even brownie cooking.
4. Quad Timer: Four timers in one for the multitasker.
5. Collapsible Chopsticks: Um...cool!
6. Equal Measure: The most informative measuring cup ever.
7. Precision Spoon Scale: Weighs as it measures.
8. Microbe Liquid Soap Dispenser: Looks like what it eradicates.

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Another round-up of food posts from our favorite environmental sister site, Green Daily:

• Tired of eating right? Check out organic dietary supplements
• Help save the environment at work during lunchtime
• Going on a picnic? Here are the most eco-friendly options for portable utensils
• Our own Suburban Farmer gives us the lowdown on egg hunting and broodiness
• Startling facts about organic food
• A Brooklyn man blogs about his experiences tracking the chain of his consumption
• No more salmon fishing on the West Coast, please
  
• No surprise here: report claims industrial animal farming is hazardous to our health and our earth
• Taco Bell is...moving toward sustainability? No, it can't be...
• Starbucks needs to teach its employees the meaning behind reusing and recycling

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Too lazy to use a knife? Sick of switching back and forth from fork to spoon when you eat your Ramen noodles?

Ah, yes. These dining conundrums have befallen even the best of us at one time or another. The solution?

Enter, crazy new cutlery. The Washington Post's Jane Black reviewed a few new designs that promise to rid us of our dining woes (or, at the very least, provide us with fodder for our next dinner party conversation).

Among the new designs:

• The "Knork," designed to serve as both knife and fork. A little awkward, but helpful for those parties where the you're perched in a corner, attempting to eat off of a tiny paper plate with just a fork.
• Mono Zeug Tools are based on primitive Neanderthal designs, in that the knife is designed to be a piece of honed flint, and the spoon, a variation of a curved oyster shell.
  
• Curvware is designed to be ergonomic so that you don't strain your hand or grip too hard when attempting to, say, cut your steak. Black pronounced it "very comfortable."
• Ramen spoon - Admit it: Ramen noodles can be annoying to eat. This design changes all that, with a spoon for the broth and fork tines for those slippery noodles. And while I wouldn't go so far as to call it "genius," as Block does, it is pretty neat. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait 'til May before you buy it.
  

Check out the video of Black testing out these new tools here.

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One of the first things I learned to do in the kitchen was crack an egg. I was four years old and standing on a step stool next to my dad, 'helping' him make pancakes on a Saturday morning. He showed me how to hold the egg firmly but carefully and tap it against the edge of the counter top. I remember the thrill I felt that he had trusted me with something so fragile and that I succeeded in not messing it up.

Over the years I've broken countless eggs (in must be in the thousands by now, in the last two weeks alone I've gone through three dozen). I've never thought of it as a onerous or trying task. I certainly didn't think that it was something that required its own utensil to do the job right. However, the human mind loves to create and so someone has invented the egg cracker, a tool that keeps your hands away from the mess of the egg white.

I can actually see how this might be useful for people who have disabilities or reduced motor control. However, for the rest of the folks out there, I think this one doesn't belong in the kitchen. What do you think? Useful tool or useless dust collector?

[via TasteSpotting]

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Designboom, a mod blog devoted to the latest and greatest in product design, recently came out with the winners of its 2006 Dining in 2015 contest. The challenge was exactly as it sounds: to design a food-related product that would be useful in 2015 at work, in travel, or at home.

Chefs and designers from Italy and Japan judged the entires and came up with the top three and an honorable mention.

Let's start from the bottom and work up. The honorable mention [ed. note: shown in photo] was an eco-friendly solution to dinner prep: silicone and nylon triangle-shaped buckets that allow the cook to boil three different foods all in one pot, thereby saving energy, time, and water. I totally expect it to be selling out on QVC in no time.

Third place? A creative ceramic salt and pepper shaker that forces you to physically break open the canister to access the spices inside. The goal of the project? There isn't any, really, but we bet it's really, really fun to break open. Save it for a day when you're really pissed off at someone, and then smash away. (But don't get carried away - - then you'll just have a mess of salt, pepper, and white ceramic shards to clean up).

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