Steven Leckart

Mac Cake: Sweet 16 = Twilight

Lisa Katayama

1932 banana-ice cream injector patent

Someone named P. Marchio filed this patent for a "banana extractor and ice cream injector" in 1932. What a wonderful idea! Unfortunately, there's no evidence that this was ever actually made, nor is there any sign that a banana with ice cream in it will ever replace the classic banana split.

[via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Want indigestion? There's an app for that

Thank God. Check out Chipotle Mexican Grill: The WebApp.

Lisa Katayama

Stemglass tray for optimal wine glass portability

What's the best way to carry multiple wine glasses at once? A restaurant in Oita Prefecture in southern Japan has found a solution in the Stemglass Tray, pictured above.

[Product page via TokyoMango]

Lisa Katayama

Review: Laptop Lunch, a bento box for geeks

Finally, a lunch box apt for geeks who like organized packed lunches! The laptop lunch bento box comes in a thermal laptop bag-like tote with an inside sleeve for gadgets and pens and notebooks. The main compartment holds a colorful modular lunch box with multiple compartments and a small spill-proof sport-style juice bottle, which also comes with the kit. A small stainless steel fork and spoon are also included. The containers are microwave and dishwasher-safe.

I used the laptop lunch box to pack Brian a meal to take on his morning surfing trip. There are four main color-coded compartments &mdash I put dumplings (left over from a feast we made last night) in the blue rectangle, cabbage & chicken & rice & pickles in the green (has a lid), farmer's cucumbers and sauteed pea shoots in the purple, and fruits in the red. The little yellow bin with the sealable lid was perfect for dipping sauce. Mango juice in the drink container.

The kit comes with an instruction booklet with some simple recipes. There are other books on Japanese-style boxed lunches, too. I have one called Bento Love, but today I just stuffed the bento box with leftovers.

When Brian came back from surfing several hours later, he reported two problems: 1. The warm food next to the cold drink made the drink warm and the food cool. 2. Because the compartments are designed to hold food horizontally but the bag's strap is on the vertical, the food gets shifted around and the flavors tended to mix. The fruit tasted slightly like chicken, he said. To avoid this, make sure to keep the saucy, juicy stuff in the sealed yellow or green containers.

Overall, yummy food + a little TLC + a great way to carry it all = one very happy surfing geek.

[Laptop Lunches bento box from ReusableBags.com]

Steven Leckart

Camp Stove Burn Wood, Fire Make Hot

GearJunkie has the goods on the StoveTec, a small wood-burning cook top that costs $35 and would make a caveman proud:

Aprovecho has created a simple wood-burning stove with a clay elbow that focuses the heat and fire in the combustion chamber directly toward a cooking pot. According to the organization, this setup dramatically reduces fuel consumption compared to open fires used for cooking by millions around the planet...

With its success in the humanitarian realm, StoveTec has made an unlikely expansion into the consumer camping market...

I tested the StoveTec GreenFire One Door stove. It has the same type of efficient combustion chamber as on the humanitarian stoves though with a handle, metal case walls, and a painted exterior finish. It comes with a pot skirt to focus flame heat and a stick support shelf where the wood sits.

It is heavy and not very portable. It does not have the jet-like flame output of a canister stove. But in my test, the GreenFire proved to be easy to use and efficient, requiring just a few small pieces of wood to boil water or cook a meal in a pot.

Here's a thorough demo of the two-door model:

Lisa Katayama

Review: Primus Eta Pack Lite

You don't want to carry too much crap with you when you're going on a climbing trip, but you still need to eat. There are several great lightweight camping stoves on the market &mdash one of them is the Primus Eta Pack Lite. It comes with a little carry sack that's about the size of a climbing helmet, and the kit includes pretty much everything you need to make pasta or soup for a couple of people &mdash a burner, an igniter, a pot with a colander top, a wind screen, and a bowl to eat out of. It only weighs 20 ounces, and boiled water in just over two minutes. It's non-stick, so easy to clean, too. I used it to make a couple of meals and I really liked it. It's $115.

Product page [Primus]

Lisa Katayama

Backpacking food taste-off

On a recent trip to Lover's Leap, a prime time climbing spot in South Lake Tahoe, my friends and I did a camping food taste test. Camping foods = dehydrated meals that come in resealable pouches that can be used to carry, cook, and eat the food in. Backpacking foods were pioneered in the 50s, when a company called Richmoor needed to find a way to keep Boy Scouts well-fed in the wilderness. They're no gourmet restaurant meals, but after a long day of climbing and hiking and being dirty, we were grateful for warm meals and pleasantly surprised by some of them.

AlpineAire Foods Hurry Curry Chicken vs. Backpacker's Pantry Pad See You with Chicken vs. Mountain House chicken breasts with rib meat & mashed potatoes

The instructions for Hurry Curry Chicken were to add 2 cups of boiling water into the pouch (don't forget to take out the oxygen absorber) and let sit for 10-12 minutes. Easy. We did that simultaneously with the Pad See You, which required 2.5 cups of boiling water and a 13-minute wait. 10 minutes later, we started up the MH chicken breasts, which only take 2-3 minutes in the pouch. Since we boiled water using a JetBoil &mdash which literally made the freezing cold Tahoe lake water boil within two minutes &mdash the whole three-course dinner for six took only 15 minutes to make.

The five of us who taste-tested these meals could not agree on one that was *the best.* Personally, I thought the Pad See You was not bad &mdash I've had worse Asian food in San Francisco that was actually cooked by a person in a wok. Angela thought the Hurry Curry was a winner &mdash it did taste a lot like dal, and in fact, if it came on a dish with naan and tikka masala I could have been fooled too. Most surprising and controversial was the chicken breast with mashed potatoes. The chicken was well-seasoned and tasty, and the mashed potatoes tastes like chives and garlic &mdash delicious! &mdash but I couldn't kick the thought that these were all artificial flavors. Matt almost ate the entire two-serving meal within minutes; meanwhile, Tommy thought it was just gross.

Backpacker's Pantry organic spicy omelet vs. Mountain House scrambled eggs with ham

BP's spicy omelet was a little bit labor-intensive &mdash it actually required us to cook it in low heat in a greased pan after mixing the stuff with water. The ingredients are all organic &mdash organic mozzarella, organic peppers, organic tomatoes, organic pasteurized dry whole egg &mdash but the taste was just okay. At least we knew it was marginally healthy... Mountain House's scrambled eggs were a just-add-hot-water type of deal, and came with precooked red and green peppers. Sure enough, it looked like fluffy scrambled eggs, but it tasted kind of like cardboard. The ingredient list included stuff like xantham gum, sodium tripolyphosphate, sodium erythorbate, and sodium nitrite, which don't really sound like food.

Next on my list to try: Natural High's chicken enchiladas and Backpacker's Pantry's chocolate cheesecake. Yum!!

Steven Leckart

BBQ Coffee Roaster

I've never roasted my own coffee, but I'm game to try it. The GEN2 Coffee Roaster drum kit is an aluminum cage and rotisserie you place on a standard bbq. Seems like a simple, potentially useful way to heat your beans.

Then again, it costs $110. Not terrible, but that's several times the price of an old popcorn popper, which can roast just fine and doesn't require manual turning. Aside from handling larger batches, I'd love to know why the bbq roaster is preferable.

[via Cooking Gadgets]

Lisa Katayama

A designer gadget that measures spaghetti

UK designer Joseph Joseph has created this awesomely cute spaghetti measuring device that measures out 1-4 servings of pasta with a camera lens-like functionality. For $8.50, it's one of those kitchen gadgets that you don't really need, but would make you look like a fancy culinary person, or at the very least, just a design-y person.

Product page (via NotCot)

Steven Leckart

O Beautiful For Spacious Bag, For Amber Waves of Beer

Timbuk2's Dolores Cooler messenger sack can hold a 12-pack of canned PBR*. The lining is insulated. One of the straps features a red pop top. All you need now is a designated cyclist.

*Person who comes up w/the best addendum, wins.**

**The prize: respect and admiration from your peers.

Rob Beschizza

iCake

April Julian made this delicious-looking iPhone cake. [via Make]

Joel Johnson

Video Update: My garden is coming along (iPhone 3GS Video comparison)

Except for some habanero peppers and some sugar snap peas that don't seem to want to thrive, my garden is doing quite nicely. It's been a joy to have space to work on it.

I shot this vid with the iPhone 3GS and uploaded to YouTube directly from the phone. It took about 10 seconds to send this 30-second clip, including compressing and sending over Wi-Fi.

Interestingly, the video was viewable on YouTube within about 60 seconds, but there was a little bar at the top that said that processing was still going on. "This video is still being processed. Video quality may improve once processing is complete." I hope so, because while being able to upload right from the phone is great, the video quality is definitely lacking.

Here's what it looks like when I uploaded the original 13.3MB file directly to YouTube. Still not amazing, but definitely better.

Steven Leckart

Review: Platypus CleanStream Gravity Filter

"Oh man, you just turned our campsite into an ER!"

The CleanStream is a gravity filtration system that resembles an IV bag. Consisting of two Platypus bladders, two hoses, and one 0.2-micron-thick hollow fiber filter (w/a cartridge that's good for ~1500L), this $90 system can handle bacteria, protozoa, viruses and particulate &mdash i.e. the gunky yellow stuff that came out of the spigot at our campsite (see below).

The CleanStream is straightforward to use. After attaching the hoses to either end of the filter, you fill the "dirty" bag from your stream, spigot or other source (avoid shallow, still puddles!), and hang up the dirty bag, leaving the "clean" bag on the ground or somewhere below the dirty one. Instantly, gravity pulls the H2O down through the filter and into the "clean" bag. There's also a clip on the hose that lets you pause the filtering if, say, you need only a smaller quantity of water in one minute vs. three.

I will admit the spigot where we were camped was unlikely to have any contaminants, bacteria, etc. However, there's something about drinking yellow water that doesn't sit too well with me. Thus, we double-filtered our water, which dramatically reduced the yellow:

[Note: to avoid mixing up the bags during use, write "dirty" or "X" on the dirty bag with a Sharpie.]

Gravity filters aren't new, but this was my first time trying one out*. Reason being the $90 price tag makes it somewhat of a luxury item, imho. When I backpacked Hawaii for 2 months in college all I used were $7 for iodine tablets. I drank from streams and waterfalls and never got sick, but the taste wasn't terrific and using tablets required way too much time: drop in tablets, wait 30 minutes, and then another 30 minutes if you also use the taste-neutralizing tablets (which I did not).

At the time, though, the tablets were way more preferable to filtering with a hand-pump. After hiking 12 miles of rocky coastline, the last thing you want to do is expend energy just for a sip of fresh water. If you're car camping (which I was recently), you're likely partial to gear that will make the experience as cush and convenient as possible.

So for $90, you can have potable water in less than 3 minutes, literally, by doing nothing. Or you could spend $7 to have potable water in 30 minutes. Or you can spend somewhere in between on a hand-pump filter and get some added exercise. Your call.

*It's worth noting there are other systems some packers have been using in conjunction with Platypus bladders, including the Sawyer and Aquamira Frontier Pro. I have no personal experience with either.

Rob Beschizza

Leather beer holster

It's yours for $125 atEtrelles' Etsy store, spotted at The Awesomer.

Joel Johnson

Coca-Cola Cupping Machine

Joel Johnson

Whoa there, Sun Chips: Ingeo corn plastic not suitable for backyard composting

NatureWorks (a subsidiary of Cargill), makes "Ingeo", a bioplastic spun from lactic acid generated from corn sugars. It's the same stuff used by Sun Chips to make their new "compostable" bags that will be released in 2010. It's exciting stuff, and I support the notion, but the commercial (linked above) is misleading about how you'll be disposing of Sun Chips bags.

According to NatureWorks' FAQ:

Can I throw Ingeo™ biopolymer into my backyard compost?

Ingeo™ biopolymer should be composted in industrial compost facilities, which contain the right managed combination of temperature and moisture. Therefore, it is not recommended for use in typical backyard composting due to the lack of high temperature and inconsistent conditions.

Steven Leckart

Hands-On With A Whippit-Powered Travel Espresso Maker

Currently in production, the MyPressi TWIST has been generating enough buzz to get a trucker from Nashville to Reno (and back). Forget press and blog attention. The $129 portable espresso maker won the best new product award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America (it's sorta like the Oscars for coffee).

The product won't be available until this fall, but there are three prototypes in existence. We recently got to see one up close and personal, taste the fruits of its pressure-driven loins, and chat with the husband and wife team behind one of the most exciting things to happen to coffee since Baileys.

More after the jump...

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Getting local farmers' crops to restaurants using the internet

Alexis Madrigal:

FarmsReach wants to make ordering from local, small farms as easy and reliable as ordering from Sysco. Farmers with smartphones would snap quick photos of their produce, then upload their products into their "virtual stalls." Restaurants could cruise through the vegetables online and pick what they wanted. It's a classic farmer's market with a high-tech twist.

Steven Leckart

HOWTO "Stir + Scoop" w/Your French Press

A writer for CoffeeGeek held a tasting event with beans from Ritual Coffee in San Francisco's Mission District to get the dirt on and posted techniques for the more adventurous French presser:

The "stir and scoop method" [is] where an additional 2 grams of coffee are added to the typical 7-gram dose of grounds (per "cup"). The grinds are agitated and the plunger is ignored until the very end; a saucer is used in its place throughout the steeping time, and two spoons are used to scoop off the grinds before the plunger is finally applied and pressed, and the brew is poured.

Users say it tastes better, makes it easier to plunge the press, and cuts down on errant grounds in your cup. That's been my experience. Here's a video demo. Stir and scoop portion begins at 03:40.

[photo by Karen Hamilton]

Update: See CoffeeGeek's corrections in the comments below.

Steven Leckart

Review: MSR MugMate Travel Filter [Verdict: Get One]

When citydwellers go camping, we tend to opt for the ol' "Cowboy Cup." Read: pour the ground beans into a cup, add water, let sit and sip. A few grounds in your mouth here and there, but dammit, you feel tough as nails.

You know what? I've decided that's plain ridiculous.

Lightweight backpacking fanatics are some of the best advisers when it comes to useful gear. You may not always walk away with the cheapest solution, but most anything they recommend is usually guaranteed to be practical, packable and well worth toting.

Case in point: MSR's MugMate, a reusable coffee filter that clocks in at just 0.98 oz. You could cart along a standard coffee filter, but this one fits directly in an average cup, and balances perfectly because of those two handles.

Featherweight fanatics urge ditching the top cover to cut down on the added 0.32 oz. On the other hand, true javaseurs say it's vital to let your coffee steep while covered. I leave the decision up to you. Either way, even if you're not camping, the MugMate works great at home or the office for a quick, single, grounds-free cup. The only downside is it requires a very slow, intermittent pour to avoid overfilling and spilling grounds into the cup.

If any true cowboys give you any guff out on the trail, you're on your own.

Joel Johnson

Un Petit Le Whif Chocolate Inhaler

Mark Wilson:

The sensation is akin to sucking a tiny bit of cocoa powder through a straw. And while not necessarily enjoyable in any way, it was admittedly a lot of chocolate flavor for only .8 calories a stick.

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: Crop Circles

Kansas fields, fed by the Ogallala Aquifer. [Earth Observatory (nasa.gov)]

Joel Johnson

Photo: NASA Snack Mobile

Countdown to a flavor liftoff.

Photo: Smailtronic

Steven Leckart

Pac-Man oven mitt lonely for Ms.

This $15 silicone glove debuted 3 months ago. How long must we/he wait for a Ms. Pac-Man mitt? ...Until then, I'd rather go doubly old school with a mitt decked out in 80s Pakkuman bedsheets from Etsy. Really wish I'd kept all my old sheets.

[Top glove via Offworld]

Steven Leckart

How To: build the ultimate, cheap home pizza oven

For years, I've baked pizza on an unglazed, 15" terra cotta stone that cost around $30. It radiates heat more evenly, which seemed to do the trick (What do I know? I grew up on Boboli).

Then my pal Jon, a pro pizzaiolo, starting coming around. The pies he crafted with our stone are delicious: light homemade dough, fresh local ingredients (including sunny-side egg). When he reported not being especially pleased with the results, I figured he was being modest. Nope. I began to realize he's right. Every slice from an artisan-style pizza joint just tastes better. Why?

Cooking at 700F+ vs. the puny 500F pumped out by my standard oven/range is part of the secret. Turns out baking with a lone stone is too. The solution: $13.50 worth of ceramic firebricks plucked from a landscape supply yard. Details after the jump -- plus, the taste test that convinced me you don't have to shell out big bucks or construct a huge outdoor oven to boost the quality of a homemade pie.

READ THE REST

Steven Leckart

Baking cakes with a Blockbuster drop box

A Blockbuster drop box isn't just a relic of a bygone era. In Liberia, it's used to bake "fabulous" cakes:

The front, where the slit had been closed, faces the wall and the back door is to access the oven; inside are several fridge trays, on which they lay the pans. The door is then locked with a simple bolt and sealed all around with wet cloths.

[via AfriGadget]

Joel Johnson

Video: "The pizza box of the 21st century"

It's nice that when I order a delivery pizza I'll no longer have to ask for extra sanctimony.

Joel Johnson

Star Wars cupcakes look a little chewy

Megpie made these awesome Star Wars cupcakes.

Joel Johnson

Tonight @ Baker Boulevard Geographic Society: How To homebrew beer

Above, Patrick and Don of the Baker Boulevard Geographic Society generate a wall of noise from found objects connected to contact mics, a portable record player, and a signal generator. (Video shot and edited by Justin.)

Not pictured: Me drinking way more than anyone else and then basically passing out right after everyone left.

We'll be meeting again this evening at 8PM, where I will attempt to brew my first batch of homebrew in about two years, whereby others may learn from my mistakes.

Previously • Tomorrow Night in Eugene: The inaugural assembly of the Baker Boulevard Geographic Society (Includes a map.)