Cooking

Now that Thanksgiving's just around the corner, it's a good time to take stock of the equipment in your kitchen to make sure you have everything you need to pull off the big feast. We've put together a three-part series of gadgets that can help with every stage of the meal. Today we'll focus on cooking the bird, with side dishes on Thursday, and desserts on Friday.

Dual baster/injector The bulb baster is a tried-and-true turkey tool used to keep the skin of the turkey moist and flavorful. Recently though, there's been a trend … Read more

Now that the clocks have been set back and winter is nigh, it's getting dark mighty early. But that doesn't mean you can't still get outside and grill. It just might take a little more effort and some good lighting.

Fortunately, there are plenty of BBQ accessories available to help make that possible. Steven Raichlen's "Lumatong" is a set of tongs with an attached LED flashlight that shines light wherever the tongs are pointed.

Brookstone's grill light clamps onto the handle of a large grill to produce a wider lighted area. And the … Read more

Digital timers can be invaluable to a cook, especially for slow-cooked food like stews or for roasting large portions of meat. But most of them can be used for only one dish, potentially problematic if you're working on a big meal with lots of individual parts.

This "triple timer" from Williams-Sonoma lets you set a timer for up to three dishes, which would be especially useful during the holidays when you might have a turkey in the oven, potatoes on the stove, and a rainbow-colored Jell-O marshmallow mold chilling in the fridge.

The timer is portable but … Read more

In case you were wondering, there is a God.

The Dough-Nu-Matic, available via the SkyMall in-flight catalog, is a miniature version of the Krispy Kreme fryer/conveyor belt that forms and fries savory doughnuts.

For just $130, you can make very small doughnuts at the clip of a dozen every six minutes. That means you can eat 120 miniature doughnuts every hour without leaving your home. You can make doughnuts in your bathroom and eat them in the shower. You can place doughnuts on each of your fingers, then eat them off like the magical Mr. Doughnut Hands. You can … Read more

AOL and the Campbell Soup Company have teamed up to make the food section of AOL's Web site a little more enticing. A new section, launched today, is called "Dinner Tonight" and features a quick and easy recipe for each night of the week. Users can tab through to see the suggested recipes for the whole week. AOL will include more than 2,000 Campbell's recipes in that section. But don't assume it's all going to be chicken baked in a can of cream of mushroom soup. Recipes for this week also come from … Read more

Here's one for the wedding registry: a gold-and-diamond-studded pot that carries a price tag just north of $200,000. The 11-inch saucepan from cookware manufacturer Fissler features almost 2.2 pounds of solid gold in its lid and side handles and logo. But what's gold without diamonds? The saucepan features 200 of them, in various sizes. It also comes packaged in a jewelry box made of root wood and accompanied by the appropriate quality certificate.

The costly cookware is not exactly being mass-produced: Each saucepan is handmade to order in Germany and available only to "the exclusive … Read more

Making a Cylon Jack-o-Lantern will be a piece of cake--er, pie--with the Pumpkin Gutter, a $12 drill attachment that lets you zip through the sticky pumpkin prep stage and get right to carving. All you have to do is cut a hole in the top of the pumpkin, use the dishwasher-safe Pumpkin Gutter to loosen the strings and thin out the walls, and then dump the guts out. The tool even leaves the seeds intact for those who like to turn them into snacks.

We're always wary of seasonal gadgets, which often turn out to be a waste of … Read more

Kristina Nielsen has a growing collection of recipes, culled from friends, family members, magazines, books, Web sites and the occasional food package label. She keeps some of them in a binder and some loosely shoved in a drawer; some are neatly printed, some hastily scribbled on notes. Others live online in her recipe boxes on various sites. Together they represent the culmination of the 10 years she's spent learning how to cook new dishes. Now, a company called TasteBook wants to take Kristina's recipe collection--and those of amateur chefs like her--into the 21st century.

TasteBook, which plans to … Read more

When computer geeks come to Japan, they head toward the electronics neighborhood called Akihabara. But when food freaks visit Tokyo, their destination is Kappabashi-dori, a mile-plus-long street sporting several dozen stores that carry all manner of kitchenware and food.

Here you can find coffee cups half a storey tall, a thousand kinds of bowls, plastic sushi, restaurant ware, and more bento boxes than you can shake a whisk at.

CNET's sister sites CHOW and Reviews have joined their mighty forces to bring you "Cooking up a high-tech kitchen," an in-depth look at several kitchens' worth of cooking … Read more