Has the government in your city or country shut down everything due to COVID-19? Are the bars, gyms and other nonessential places closed? Are you stuck at home, cooped up with nothing but Facebook and Twitter to fan the flames of your outrage and fear?
Don’t worry. There are plenty of things to do at home. Why not take advantage of all that extra time and use it for something you enjoy?
“Hey Siri, 30-minute timer!” you shout across the kitchen, elbows deep in turkey gizzards. Only Siri isn’t interested. It’s already running that one-hour timer for the roast potatoes. Why would anybody want to run multiple timers at the same time? Silly human.
Thankfully, Shortcuts is here to save your bacon (and your Brussel’s sprouts, sage-and-onion stuffing, and so on). If you’re feeling fancy, you could even set this up to use with Siri, but today we’ll keep it simple. So, no matter how complex your Christmas Day cooking arrangement, Shortcuts will let you know when your goose is cooked.
Have you ever decided to make dinner, only to find the recipe has gone missing. Sometimes it’s a misplaced notecard, other times, a saved (or pinned) link that is now dead. With Paprika, your favorite recipes are stored digitally, and you’re in control. As someone who cooks nearly every day, Paprika is the best recipe app for chefs of any skill level.
IBM first designed its artificial intelligence computer system, Watson, to dominate humans in Jeopardy. Now before the machine takes over the world, Watson is moving on to the finer things in life by releasing a new cookbook, Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson.
If you’ve been longing for a cooking show with smart writing, attractive hosts and a ton of sexual innuendo, look no further than The Katering Show, where Aussies Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney smile for the camera while comparing too-expensive German multi-mixers to gangbangs.
“So, ‘What is a Thermomix?’ I hear anyone under the age of 33 ask,” says the perky McLennan. “It’s a blender, a microwave, an ice bucket and a set of kitchen scales. It’s a gangbang of kitchen appliances that’s created a futuristic robot saucepan. It’s the kind of appliance that your rich mother-in-law gives you as a wedding gift because she doesn’t think you can cook. Or something that you buy yourself because you’ve always wanted to join a cult, but you don’t have the energy for the group sex.”
Right? Now you need to watch the funniest cooking show I’ve ever seen, with the episode about making risotto (hot wet rice) in a gadget that looks like (and costs like) it might have come out of Jony Ive’s design shop.
Even the BeachSafe won’t save you if you leave it alone on the beaches of Barcelona, but it’s still a pretty neat idea. It’s a tote bag that folds out to make a seat for sitting on the sand. Slide your towel out of its compartment, fill that compartment with sand (for ballast) using the built-in scoop and secure the bag’s opening with a combination lock. It won’t stop anyone from making off with the whole thing, but I like the idea of a combo bag/seat, whether it’s safe or not. €60
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Bart van Olphen thinks he can conquer your fear of cooking fish if you’ll just give him 15 seconds.
The seafood chef from Amsterdam uses Instagram’s relatively new video feature for Fish Tales, which is probably the world’s fastest cooking show in this golden age of refined eating.
“People really like the simplicity of the recipes,” van Olphen told Cult of Mac. “You really can learn how to cook in only 15 seconds.”
Cooking shows have been simmering since the early days of television, with pioneers like James Beard and Julia Child unraveling the mysteries of the kitchen. With the emergence of the Food Network in 1993, the format boiled over into a ratings bonanza, turning chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Rachel Ray into celebrities. Now YouTube is home to dozens of shows featuring entrepreneurial cooks seeking to cash in on the foodie craze.
It looks like a chopping board made of wood — but it isn’t, and it isn’t. Instead, Thingk’s Gkilo (we imagine the names were conjured up during an alcohol-induced haze late one night and scrawled on the back of a cocktail napkin, then semi-deciphered the next morning) is actually a dual kitchen scale and clock disguised as a chopping board.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2014 – Belkin is really hopping onto this connected-home thing with fiery fervor. They already have a formidable array of Internet-connected devices in their WeMo line — switches, plugs, motion detectors — and now they’ve added light bulbs and a DIY WeMo interface that can be adapted for use with practically anything that’s powered by electricity. Oh, they’ve also just come out with a big, shiny cloud-connected crockpot so you can cook dinner from the office.
MyFlavors for the iPad is a clever recipe app which auto-rips recipes from the web and separates out the various components, tidily parsing out and filing directions, ingredients, photos, the description and the cook time. The app is free, but requires a $5 in-app purchase to actually do more than try it out.
