As much as I love to cook, I am really not a fan of kitchen gadgets. This is partially out of necessity; our very small kitchen doesn’t have room to store every species of specialized tool for making every conceivable cooking task a breeze. I also have a deep aversion to spending money, so when I walk into the local kitchen store whatever desire I feel is quickly snuffed out by a look at the prices. All that said, I can’t pass up a deal, so when Martha came home from some thrift-shopping with news of old-fashioned, hand-cranked meat grinders for the ridiculous price of $2.00, I made a quick decision: it was time to start grinding my own meat.

“But Tom,” you say, “it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t have to grind your own meat anymore! You can buy it ground in nice little packages from your local grocery. You can even get it pre-pattied for all your hamburger needs!” True, but then how would I get two dollars worth out of this grinder? Besides, there are some real advantages to grinding meat at home. If you’re worried about E. Coli,  grinding in small batches means less chance of mixing in contaminated meat (this always remains a possibility, of course). More importantly for me, by grinding at home I can control what beef gets ground. Specifically, I can grind in a high percentage of beefy, marbled short-ribs. Given the variety of beef cuts available, a grinder can take you way beyond the grocery store options of chuck or sirloin.

Although the pitted cast iron surfaces, wooden handle, and the fact that it was a consumer product made in the USA all suggested to me that my thrift store grinder was quite old, it appears that it was actually in production recently enough to be sold new over the Internet. My particular model was either old and neglected or just neglected enough to require vigorous a scrubbing down.

With a mind to that scrubbing, I fired up the Google to learn about meat grinder care and was surprised and a little disappointed that my meat grinder was actually a Food Chopper — a kind of proto-food processor. The difference seems to be that while meat grinder usually extrude the grind through perforated disks, the Universal Model 2 Food Grinder passes the food through a kind of toothed wheel that screws on to the end of the unit. Different tooth sizes and spacings are used to produce different sized chops. But you can in fact grind meat with a food processor (chill cubes in freezer 30 minutes then pulse), so it stands to reason that its predecessor would work well enough. I set about cleaning it anyway.

With all the parts cleaned and dried, I was excited to cube my beef and get to the business of grinding. For simplicity’s sake I planned to make hamburgers using a beef blend that has worked in the past: about 70% beef short ribs and 30% chuck. For the beef to be caught by the augur of the Universal Model 2, I cut it into 1″ chunks.

The grinding process went very smoothly; I was able to process the 1.5# of beef in under 5 minutes. I did notice two apparent flaws in the design: 1.) the cutting wheel is positioned too close over the base of the grinder, making it difficult to place any kind of tray in a spot where it will collect all of the ground meat and 2.) as I was grinding, I started to notice blood dripping onto the floor out of the place where the handle attached to the augur. Martha acted quickly, putting a plate down to protect our floor, but it seems to me that any blood that is squeezed out by the action of the grinder is blood that’s not going to be making your hamburgers juicy. Still, for a pound and a half of meat, I think we only lost a teaspoon of blood; hardly earth-shattering. This might be remedied in the future by remembering to chill the meat in the freezer before grinding to firm it up. The grind produced by the larger cutting wheel was suitable for hamburgers, though I might have liked it a bit coarser.

How were the burgers? They were good — how could anything involving that much short-rib go wrong? I was pleased not to notice any metallic taste from flaking off rust — we must have done a good enough job scrubbing. Ideally, I would like to do a blind taste-test involving store-ground beef, beef ground in a food processor and the Universal. I am also excited to use the grinder in other applications, especially revisiting my old friend the terrine. Now I just have to figure out where I’m going to put the thing.

Ever since, oh, January 2nd I’ve been on an organization and cleaning binge. Perhaps the rest of you find yourself in this new-year-cleaning mode as well? If you don’t have the itch to clean, don’t feel bad—I don’t mean to say our place is in perfect order. Given the de-decoration that occurred on January 6 and the distance and darkness of our storage area where holiday décor is stored year round, I’ve yet to deal with a certain number of boxes of ornaments and lights. As they say, no one is perfect. On the other hand, our linen closet is pristine, as is the office area and every surface including windowsills and (!) kitchen cabinets. With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking back to some organization aids found on our visit to one of the fall craft fairs at the Midtown Global Market. There we found St. Paul-based online retailers Olive and Myrtle who carry, among other things, Beehive SoftBowls by MIO. Exploring MIO’s own web site today, I found some other fun treasures. Here are a couple of highlights, including the bowls themselves, which are definitely on my wish list.

Incidentally, Olive and Myrtle also carries one of my favorite gifts from Tom, a game called Pandabo made entirely of bamboo. It’s a bit like Jenga, a bit like Pick up Sticks, and a lot of fun. Tom picked up the game here in Linden Hills at Wonderment, but it’s good to know it’s also available online.

Images: MIOculture.com, Olive and Myrtle

I just found out about littlefactory.com via a post on Shelterrific, a blog I read pretty regularly. What caught my eye on their site were these number placemats.

Order soon if you like the look, with shipping from Hong Kong orders should have been in by the 5th to arrive by the 25th. I may just take my chances…

Having waited all summer for a sale on this set of bowls, I scooped them up on Tuesday night at the Edina store. They’re graphic, bold, red, and have lids… there’s the lot to like here.You can buy one, two, or all three in a set. At $3.95 to $6.95 and $15.85 for the set, why not? Now if only they’d cut the prices on their area rugs…

Images: Crate&Barrel

Happy Friday, friends!

Checking out sales this morning I found Emmo Home has NexTime’s flip clock on sale, and I thought I’d share, though it’s still a bit $$$. No longer $200, it’s now $138. In the meantime, a cheaper [read:free] flip clock can be found here. Besides the flipping sound’s general appeal, flip clocks remind me of being in Italy. Check out Andy Lepki’s photography to see what I mean (this picture and this other one specifically).

Enjoy your weekend!

I’m thinking of taking advantage of this end-of-summer sale at Chiasso to get a hanging planter for our dining room. At half their original price, this is a deal I thought I’d share.

Not all hanging pots are meant to be used inside, so I was most excited to find these planters are indoor-friendly. I’m hoping that means when I water the spider plant (now living in a small bowl) it won’t drip down onto our hardwood floors.

Image: Chiasso

While checking out this NYTime’s Interactive on Wednesday, part of their “Shopping with [fillintheblank]” series in the Home & Garden section, this bike rack really jumped out at me. It’s slim, it’s good looking, and it’s $13 on Amazon. We’ve talked about hanging bikes in small spaces before, but this one takes the cake at 10% of the cost of the Cycloc. You’ll probably need Da Vinci’s back tire tray as well for $6, bringing you another six away from $25 free shipping.

Image, Delta Cycle.

Image, Canoe. You can shop Canoe, too.

Pure Modern is a site that I’ve browsed but never bought from. Given these items on (pretty excellent) sale at the moment… that may change. While the other three objects might be outside of what could be defined as needs, we have been in the market for a camping shovel as it is. Besides the shovel, I’m eyeing these two radios, more so the Tykho, and the low-low price on Reistenthal’s Mini-Maxi Shopper. I wonder if others remember when the Tykho rubber radio was first released in the year 2000? I was 15 and remember it pretty clearly; it graced the cover of our copy of TIME that spring. Nine years later, if you’ve ever thought of getting one, jump on this. Now a part of the MoMA design collection, the Tykho hasn’t really dropped in price since its introduction in 2000. Other sites price the rubber radio from 50 to 100 dollars. I don’t know about you, but of the choice between pink or grey (unless you’re willing to pay the big bucks), I’d opt for the latter.

I may just have to pick up multiple Mini Maxi’s in order to be able to gift them to you all come December. Get ready to kick your plastic habit.

Lime Plug-in FM Radio, $21.50; Tykho AM-FM Radio, $33.50; Camping Multi-Tool, $13.25; Reisenthal Mini Maxi Shopper, $2.75. Images, puremodern.com

On Friday night I headed down to The Four Firkins for a tasting of Crispin cider. There seems to be a lot of hype surrounding Crispin right now, at the very least on the Internet. With Joe Heron the CEO in the house pouring and talking about his cider, it seemed like a good time to see what all the talk was about.

As it  turns out, Joe being there was quite advantageous, since I learned all kinds of interesting things about cider and cider manufacture. Some of them being:

You don’t actually need a special license to produce cider—the bodies regulating liquor sales don’t require one and won’t issue one. Since alcohol distributors were wary of selling unlicensed booze, Crispin obtained a license but were only able to do so by claiming to produce apple wine. You will notice that Crispin cider has a nutrition information label, while beer and wine never do: this is because Crispin cider is regulated by the FDA, rather than the liquor authorities. So that’s why I don’t know how many calories are in my beer! It is also illegal to carbonate cider to the level of beer—it has to be slightly less.

It’s really hard to find cider apples in the US. Sweet apples are not good for cider. As Joe said, the more edible an apple is, the worse it is for making cider. He fantasizes about making a barrel of Cider from crabapples. Crispin uses a blend of apples including Granny Smith, Gala and some others and finish their cider with concentrate. Apparently some brewers make their cider exclusively from concentrate, and this is to be poo-pooed.

There were four ciders available to try. I started with the regular, which was slightly dry but pretty fruity, like a tangy apple juice. Next up was the brut, which as you might expect was drier. This was my favorite. The third was a limited edition that won’t be available in stores for a couple of weeks: the Honeycrisp. Don’t let the name fool you, it’s not actually made with honeycrisp apples—according to Joe you could hardly find a worse apple to make cider with: too sweet and hardly any acid. Instead, the Honeycrisp is regular made with honey. The honey was quite strong; it was the dominant flavor. Finally, after I had had enough free samples to ensure my bike ride back home would be an interesting challenge, Joe offered me a sample of the final variety of Crispin: Light. I liked the light because it was dry like the brut and without a very strong apple flavor.

As is always the case when I’m offered free alcohol, I bought some to take home. I would have liked to buy the brut but they were sold out; instead I bought a four-pack of the Light. Joe recommended to several people to drink the light over ice with a wedge of lemon. After visiting the farmers’ market the next day, I didn’t have any lemon, but I had a bunch of raspberries, so I made a cocktail that I think Joe would approve of.