Crave

NatureMill's automated composter can fit in a regular kitchen cabinet.

(Credit: NatureMill)

The quest to make kitchens around the country more eco-friendly just got a little easier. NatureMill, a San Francisco-based company founded by an MIT grad in 2004, is adding to its lineup of indoor automatic composters.

NatureMill's composters speed up the process of composting by heating, mixing, and aerating the waste that gets put into it. After two weeks, fresh food waste can be turned into nutrient-rich fertilizer for the garden, according to the company. They're small enough to fit into a regular kitchen cabinet (20 inches long by 12 inches wide by 20 inches high), and to reduce the stink, air is forced through a carbon filter when it gets sucked in to oxygenate the waste.

The regular "Plus" model will run you $299 and can process up to 120 pounds of waste per month. And although it's small enough that it could probably fit in a smaller apartment kitchen, it's only useful if you've got a yard in which to use the compost you make. One batch of compost is good for 10 - 40 square feet, according to the company, so you'll need to have a big enough yard to accommodate a fair amount of fertilizer. For people considering setting up a more traditional compost bin, though, the NatureMill system can be kept inside the house to reduce the need to take out kitchen waste so often; used outside, it works faster than passive composting and doesn't require the same kind of attention to acidity, temperature, and aeration that so-called managed composting does. And the company says the composters will hold up in the rain and snow.

Don't look so guilty, little one. One pup's trash is another man's tulips.

(Credit: NatureMill)

NatureMill also makes a professional version that's intended for heavier use. It comes with a foot pedal for hands-free operation, has components made of stainless steel, and can be switched into vacation mode for times when the kitchen is closed. There's even a version for pet owners, which can accept pet and kitchen waste. The pet-friendly composter has its limits though; NatureMill does not recommend it for use with horses or other large animals. Both of those models go for $399.

For those wondering about the trade-off in power usage, the company says it consumes less energy than a standard night-light and costs about 50 cents per month to run.

Sometimes watching sci-fi shows can be depressing. On the one hand, the imagination blossoms with all the possibilities the future holds. On the other hand, everything you see? You can't have it. Because you know what? You don't live in the future. Sorry. No gagh for you.

So it's with mixed feelings that I point you, dear readers, over to io9, who has put together a list of the best sci-fi kitchen gadgets. The list of neat things you can't have includes such wonders as the knife that toasts your bread while it cuts, and the Star Trek replicator, which pretty much conjures up whatever you want whenever you want it.

Eat your heart out. And try not to think about the fact that, here in the real world, we can't even get a freakin' Internet fridge worth buying.

Eat a bowl of doughnuts for every meal.

(Credit: SkyMall)

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 buy a kiddie pool, fill it with doughnuts, and swim in it while wearing doughnuts as water wings.

Dials on the side of the machine let you adjust the cooking temperature, but alas, there is no "jelly" setting. You'll need to hollow out the doughnuts and inject jelly into them yourself.

You'll need your own dough, and SkyMall doesn't mention whether oil is included in the package. You may need that, too, but the machine's enclosed, covered oil fryer means you won't get splattered with hot oil while you watch the doughnuts get ready for business....the business of shoving them into your pie-hole.

I repeat: you can now make doughnuts in your home and eat the living hell out of them.

[Via Geekologie.]

Now even procrastinators can serve up tender, tasty meat as if they hadn't forgotten to start marinating until 10 minutes before their guests arrived.

The Reveo requires a surprisingly small amount of marinade. Mmmm...meat juice...

(Credit: Jennifer Guevin/CNET Networks)

I recently got to test out the Reveo MariVac from Eastman Outdoors, a funky kitchen appliance that looks suspiciously like a rock tumbler and that the company claims can cut down the time it takes to marinate meat to a fraction of the norm.

To use it, you just put raw meat and marinade into a compartment that tumbles it all together for up to 20 minutes. The idea behind the machine is that it vacuums out the air in the main barrel, stretching the fibers of the meat to allow the marinade to soak deeper into the meat in a shorter amount of time. All the while, the barrel turns, tumbling the meat and the marinade together in a messy bucket of flavor and goodness.

The company says the Reveo can do the equivalent of 4 hours of marination in 20 minutes, so I donned my lab coat and safety goggles and conducted a little experiment to see if the Reveo would hold up to these claims. As luck would have it, a co-worker was having a barbecue over the weekend, so I had plenty of potential judges who were more than happy to weigh in.

Reuters has a story about a man who's apparently contracted a life-threatening lung disease that his doctor says may be linked to his massive consumption of microwave popcorn. He ate several bags of buttered microwave popcorn each day, according to the story. (The FDA is now launching an investigation to see if the additive diacetyl could be responsible for his illness and that of workers in plants where microwave popcorn is made.)

The West Bend Stir Crazy in action.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

This news is not totally shocking to me. That's not to say anyone should expect to come down with lung disease because they ate food that's readily available on grocery store shelves. But I have deep-seated distrust for a lot of the packaged food out there, namely because of all the preservatives and other chemical additives they tend to contain. As such, I try to avoid the pervasive nasties as often as possible.

But this is no easy feat when it comes to popcorn, for which I have an insurmountable weakness. Popcorn is like kryptonite to my will power. I simply cannot get enough of it.

Fortunately, there are lots of appliances available that make it easy for me to balance these two forces--my loathing for eating strange chemicals and my crazy love for eating popcorn. Making it by hand in a lidded pot with oil is easy enough. But for total ease of use, it's tough to beat a standard air popper. Or so I thought before a friend gave me this super appliance.

The West Bend Stir Crazy popcorn popper is one of those rare gadgets that's functional and actually fun to use. The non-stick bottom heats up like an electric wok. To use it, you just put a little oil and the unpopped kernels on the bottom, put the dome lid over the top and turn the Stir Crazy on. A thin metal rod spins around just above the heated bottom, keeping the kernels from sitting still (and therefore burning). After a few minutes, the popcorn starts popping away like one of those old Fisher-Price vacuum cleaners.

When you're done, you can just flip the whole thing upside-down and use the dome as your popcorn bowl.

With the top cover off, butter can be melted through the top of the dome while popcorn pops--in theory anyway.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

The top of the dome has holes in it, and you can put butter there while the popcorn pops. The idea is that the heat will melt the butter, which will then drip down onto the popcorn below (the Stir Crazy comes with a small cover you can place over that section when you're done so all the remnants of the butter don't drip onto your lap while you eat). A neat idea, but it hasn't worked that well for me. I've always used refrigerated butter, and the popcorn's always done before the butter has melted.

For those who get peeved at unpopped kernels, the Stir Crazy performs well, usually only leaving a few duds behind per batch. I'm told it can be used for making caramel corn, too, though I haven't tried that yet.

If you're looking to cut microwave popcorn and all its spooky additives out of your diet, the Stir Crazy is a pretty solid way to go about it.

(Credit: ProductDose)

A lot of the "conceptual gadgets" we feature here are just for laughs. Case in point: Buster the snail vacuum. But this one, called Coo.Boo, I think is actually pretty neat. It's shaped like a spatula, but it's actually a "digital cookbook" that wirelessly collects recipe information or even audio-visual cooking lessons from your computer and displays them on its screen.

I love to find recipes on food blogs and recipe sites, so this could be really cool so that I don't have to either jet back and forth from the stove to my computer screen, or print out a recipe and inevitably get it totally covered in molasses or fish sauce or whatever sticky stuff I'm cooking with. So I could totally use the Coo.Boo. And the best part? It's dishwasher-safe.

But it's a prototype, so you can't get one yet. And neither can I. Boo!

(Via ProductDose.)

(Credit: Tokyomango)

We hadn't realized that the Age of Transparency had made its way into the kitchen, but apparently it has in Japan. On prominent display at the National Electronics' Invention Station in Tokyo were a refrigerator, a washing machine and an air conditioner all with completely transparent casings, according to Gizmodo.

It's interesting to note that, while the trend in many domestic products seems to be leaning toward the neon, these Japanese appliances have gone the opposite route altogether with no color at all. That would be OK with us in theory, but we wouldn't want to subject the contents of our fridge--much less our washing machine--to mixed company.

No, these aren't the lockers from "Napoleon Dynamite," but they're close. They are architect-designed refrigerators that will go head to head with yesterday's Big Chill coolers in Crave's first and possibly last weekend Domestic Appliance Faceoff.

These vibrant appliances are manufactured by Smeg (could they please change their name?) and come in dozens of Crayola colors plus models clad in rainbow stripes and even the Union Jack, a la Austin Powers.

The ones shown here, which we spotted on Appliancist, aren't exactly our taste, but they certainly could be worse. We'll let you judge which fridge emerges victorious.

(Photo: Smeg International)

As every worthy domestic god or goddess knows, kitchen appliances are everything. And they must be as fashionable as they are practical.

Alas, few companies truly understand this aesthetic--but, thankfully, D.R. Cooker is one of them. The latest display of the appliance designer's creative prowess is the crystal ball range hood. The look of this "remote-controlled extractor hood" is surprisingly versatile: As Appliancist points out, it can be interpreted as a disco ball or a chandelier, making it appropriate for a kegger or a cotillion. Our take: It would be the perfect companion to this designer washing machine.

(Photos: D.R. Cooker Hoods)