Cooking For Engineers®

Recently, I received a wireless thermometer from Thermoworks to try out. Their newest product is called Smoke and is specifically designed to help people barbecue and smoke food at home. Smoke has two parts - a base unit (which takes two of Thermoworks standardized Pro-Series probes) and a wireless receiver unit - which lets the user track the air temperature and the food temperature without going outside to the smoker.
Thermoworks is selling the Smoke at $99 and this would definitely welcome tool for anyone who likes to slow cook food outside.

These days when I reach for a spatula to turn food in a pan, I've been finding myself grabbing the GastroMax Slotted Turner more often than not. Tina bought this spatula for me after months (or maybe years) of listening to me complain about our various spatulas. After buying the GastroMax Turner, my complaining has stopped.

In October 2005, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service banned the importing of Beluga caviar from the Black Sea basin. This ban, along with a ban in September 2005 of Beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea, effectively cuts off the supply of Beluga caviar to the United States. Then, in January 2006, the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) temporarily banned the international trade of beluga caviar. These decisions were reached in an attempt to help conserve the dwindling population of Beluga sturgeon, an endangered species. In this article, we examine some of the different kinds of caviar and examine some of the issues surrounding this luxury food.

One of the most embarrassing moments of my life involves baking muffins for a visitor in my apartment back in April of 2007. These "muffins" I was making actually had to be good, not the barely eatable non-sense I usually made. Having no other game plan I threw something together, prayed, and dished out my questionable muffins to my guest. What a bad host I am! That day, I thought really hard... so what exactly are baked goods? We say "pie crust, muffin, cupcake, coffee cake, puff pastry, and croissant", but do we know what they actually mean? Michael Ohene is an electrical engineer by profession with an interest in the modeling and classification of artistic disciplines including: baking, knot tying, and floral design. At the heart of his research at www.whatsthesequency.com he demonstrates the ability to transform random logic into more accessible visual logic.