Hasta La Ideas

Twin brothers and designers R&E Praspaliauskas have designed a collection of shoes made of bread. (more…)

Since I only have two drawers in my kitchen, I’m constantly on the lookout for space-saving versions of the tools I use. I have a collapsible colander and try to use knives instead of small, specific gadgets.

A reader (whose e-mail I unfortunately prematurely deleted, so I can’t give proper attribution) sent us a link to this wonderful collapsible cheese grater that is now at the top of my wish list:

The Joseph Joseph brand cheese grater folds flat for storage and up for use. It’s sturdy and comes in a handful of colors. It’s great for small-space living.

I’m really looking forward to getting rid of the giant cheese grater I have now.

Philips Design in Eindhoven have designed a series of conceptual products for food, including a machine (below) that prints combinations of ingredients into shapes and consistencies specified by the user (above).

The device, akin to a rapid prototyping machine for food, was conceived as part of the company’s Design Probes scheme, which investigates how we may live in 15-20 years’ time.

Foods would be constructed from ingredients corresponding to the nutritional needs of the user, using a similar process to rapid prototyping.

It could be used in conjunction with two other innovations envisaged as part of the same project: a scanning wand for analysing the user’s individual nutritional needs and the nutritional value of food items, and a system for farming in the home.

Here’s some more information from Philips Design:

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Info On Project

Philips Design’s ongoing design probes program has been further extended with three explorations into the area of food.

These projects – Diagnostic Kitchen, Food Creation and Home Farming – take a provocative and unconventional look at areas that could have a profound effect on the way we eat and source our food 15-20 years from now.

New ways of looking at food

“We were very interested in new ways of looking at what we eat and the processes that food undergoes before we consume it,” says Clive van Heerden, Senior Director of design-led innovation at Philips Design.

These investigations took into consideration wider societal trends like the shift in emphasis from curative to prevent medicine, the growth in popularity of organic ingredients, genetic modification, land use patterns in growing food, the threat of serious food shortages and rising food prices.

Three interlinked areas of exploration were identified: the Diagnostic Kitchen, Food Creation and Home Farming.

Proper analysis of our diets

The Diagnostic Kitchen concept allows people to take an accurate and personally relevant look at what they eat. Rather than relying on general information like ‘recommended daily intake’ it becomes possible to scan food and analyze how well its contents match your current needs.

By using the Nutrition monitor, consisting of a scanning ‘wand’ and swallowable sensor, you could, for example, determine exactly how much you should eat to match your digestive health and nutritional requirements.

It would also be possible to use the monitor to analyze food in the shops before deciding what to buy.

All of this would obviously be of enormous benefit for those trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Food printing

The second exploration area, Food Creation, has been inspired by the so-called ‘molecular gastronomists.’ These chefs deconstruct food and then reassemble it in completely different ways, so for instance you could be served carrot as foam or parmesan cheese as a strand of spaghetti.

“We wanted to examine how you could take this idea further in the domestic environment” says van Heerden. This led to the concept of a Food printer, which would essentially accept various edible ingredients and then combine and ‘print’ them in the desired shape and consistency, in much the same way as stereolithographic printers create 3-D representations of product concepts.

The nutritional value and relevance of what was being ‘printed’ could also be adjusted based on input from the diagnostic kitchen’s nutrition monitor.

Growing food in the living room

Home Farming, as the name suggests, explores growing at least part of your daily food inside your house. “People are increasingly concerned about how their food has been manipulated and processed, genetic modification, global shortages, environmental degradation through monoculture, the distance food travels before reaching their plates and many other related issues,” says van Heerden.

“One way of addressing such legitimate concerns is to source the food yourself by having a biosphere in your living room.” This Biosphere home farm contains fish, crustaceans, algae, plants and other mini-ecosystems, all interdependent and in balance with each other. Making families all over the world at least partly self-sufficient in this way has obvious appeal.

Stimulating discussion

The intention, as with all probe programs, is to elicit reaction and provoke discussion which can be used to further refine the ideas.

About the probes program

The Philips Design probes program is a unique foresighting initiative which tracks emerging developments in five main areas – politics, economics, environment, technology and culture. The outcomes of this ‘far-future’ research are used to identify systemic shifts that could affect business in years to come and that could lead to new areas in which to develop intellectual property.

Last summer, while sharing a bottle of wine with food columnist Kim O’Donnel, I professed that I wanted to learn to can. Kim didn’t skip a beat, she’s always game for whatever random schemes I hatch, and said that she would teach me. Then, before we could set a date, she decided to follow her husband to Seattle and skipped town (if I didn’t like her husband so much, I would have protested this decision much more vehemently — whisking my pal away to live on the other coast is usually grounds for a good fist shaking and finger waving).

So, this summer, I had to give this canning thing a try without her seasoned help. My belief is that canning is preferred to freezing because the power can’t go out on your pantry. Also, when done with friends, you get to divvy up the goods and everyone goes home with amazing treats. It’s wonderful in the middle of winter to open up a can of tomatoes picked from your own garden when they were at their peak. (And, even though I put fake flowers in my window boxes, I do have a garden. Growing food is a much different endeavor in my mind than frivolous ornamental plants required by the HOA.)

I decided to take a sweet route on my first foray into canning. My friend Krystal and I headed to the Chesterfield Berry Farm near Richmond, Virginia, with high hopes for making strawberry jam. In the fields, we picked more than 20 pounds of beautifully ripe strawberries and then made what can only be described as the world’s best jam. (Twenty pounds of strawberries was overkill, by the way — eight or nine pounds would have been enough.)

Over the next 12 months, in addition to consuming as much of it as my stomach will hold, I’ll be giving out the extra jars as gifts instead of the obligatory bottle of wine when I go to dinner parties at friends’ homes.

How is canning uncluttered? Well, I’m not sure that it is in the strictest of senses. It is, however, a great way to extend the fresh fruits and vegetables of summer throughout the whole of the year. It saves money (a lot cheaper to grow your own than it is to buy it in a store during the off-season) and it makes meal planning extremely simple. The New York Times ran an informative article this week on this very subject titled “Can It, Preserve It, Pickle It, Savor It” that provides many resources for new canners. Even if you don’t have a garden, you can head to your local farmer’s market and pick up the in-season foods you wish to can.

Do you can food? How does it help you with meal planning? Tell us about your experiences in the comments.

I often get requests from readers asking me to put together “bare minimum” lists. Lists that answer the question: How many items of X should I have and should I even have Y? I understand the desire for such lists — we’ve even written a few in the past — but they’re always met with mixed reviews. What works for me doesn’t necessarily work best for you.

That being said, I recently stumbled upon two great “bare minimum” lists for kitchen pantries in the Chicago Tribune. Instead of thinking about them as lists of must-have items, I thought about them as guides to figuring out what was clutter in my cupboard. If something in my pantry wasn’t on either list, I put it on the dining room table for further evaluation.

After this sorting process, I constructed a series of meals to use up the extraneous items. Most of these questionable items were nearing their expiration dates, too, so it made for a worthwhile activity.

Check out the lists and consider using them as clutter identification guides for your kitchen pantry:

• Dawn Jackson Blatner’s healthful pantry
• Mark Bittman’s healthful pantry