Electric kettles are a must if you love hot beverages. I would say ours gets turned on about a dozen times a day. Every Brit, Scot and Irish has one in their kitchen because they love tea as much as they love a pint. I don’t know why it hasn’t caught on here (except in hotels).

This dealie heats up water in seconds and frees up your stove’s burners. The best thing? It’s for the forgetful. You turn it on, leave to do some other shit and it turns out automatically after it comes to a roaring boil.

Alton Brown uses his to make hard boiled eggs in. We use it for our coffee (recently switching from drip to French press).

Now you are probably going to say, “Chewy, you are smart, funny, talented and beautiful and I’d hate to argue with you, but aren’t those things going to become obsolete when everyone has a Tasso-type machine?” No! Those on cup pod machine things are amazingly fast, but they won’t make you a proper cup. Water for coffee should be heated to about 190 degrees F and water for green tea should be heated to about 165 degrees F.

$10 from Amazon.com* (as pictured). They have $60+ Braun ones, but that’s a jack. Why pay six times more for something that just heats water? I guess if you are a sucker for designer names and chrome, but you shouldn’t be reading this blog if you are like that, anyway.

*Right now, they have a promotion at Amazon.com where if you buy four selected kitchen gadgets, you get one of them for free. And this electric kettle is in the deal. I’ve already taken advantage of it twice.

A little over five years ago, a close friend of mine introduced me to a Louisiana-based culinary innovation called the turducken. For those not in the know, the turducken is born when an evil genius debones one duck, one chicken, and one turkey. Said evil genius then proceeds to layer the birds: Turkey, duck, chicken, interspersing layers of stuffing, and reconstructing them so that the finished product somewhat resembles the original turkey.

Last week, I was treated to a food technology demonstration at the French Culinary Institute : The two chefs put together their own version of a turducken, prepared using a technique called low temperature cooking (or if you have a vacuum bag, sous vide). During this presentation the chefs showed off industrial products - one in specific that I’m focusing on - that restaurants, food manufacturers and other large scale operations who aren’t me can seem to get their hands on. These hydrocolloids (fancy name for food chemicals), as our presenters at the FCI explained, are basically all the polysyllabic words on the back of food packaging.

With that in mind, the one specific ingredient that stood out that I now need to get my hands on, was transglutaminase, sometimes referred to as “meat glue”. One of the challengers on Iron Chef (the NASCAR of culinary TV) made noodles out of shrimp using this stuff. And I could make carpaccio ravioli, if I could only get my hands on it. What transglutaminase does, chemically, is bond proteins together, like this:

Protein bonding.

In my searches for transglutaminase, I have found that “Ajinomoto Co of Japan was the first to develop and market transglutaminase for food applications under the trade name Activa™ TG.” And that, “Ajinomoto is a global food company that had the knowledge, experience and ability to create and market a consistent and high quality product that others try to imitate.” What I didn’t find is where I can easily obtain a bag of Activa™ TG or any other transglutaminase product that will allow me to combine meats without the hassle of butcher’s twine, and more effectively at that. Apparently the food science sector doesn’t want us “normals” to have access to naturally existing enzymes that can do things to dead animals that would make bestiality loving necrophiliacs blush.

If anybody out there can point me in the direction of a store that carries kitchen chemistry sets, I would be eternally grateful.