Thank you to Mary at Kettle & Cup for this post on recalled enamel tea kettles – if you bought one between October 2005 and January 2010, check out her post!

My lovely kitchen scale is here, and I love it. It doesn’t take up much space at all, the display is easy to read, and it couldn’t be easier to use. The tare function works beautifully and switching between grams, pounds and ounces is no problem at all. And I will admit, I have been geeking out a little with it. :)

So far I have learned that 2 ounces of shaved ham is a lot more than I thought, which bodes well for my ham sandwiches, and (with some help from MasterCook) that 1/2 cup of my chicken salad is 256 calories. (And worth every one of them in my mind.) And that the croissants I get at the market run 375 calories a pop. (I had four of them, weighed them all together, discovered they are 3.265 ounces on average.) Yes, I am a bit of a dork. But a happy dork.

Oh, and as a complete aside, Picasa3 now has a built in watermark function – much easier than having to use a separate piece of software for it.

I should have done this ages ago, because so many baking recipes are by weight and not volume.  The more pressing matter at the moment is trying to figure out how much I’m eating…

I’m not planning on weighing every morsel before it hits my mouth by any means.  But, I have a horrid time trying to visualize how much something weighs.  It’s great to know that 2 ounces of shaved ham is 60 calories, but not so helpful if you have no idea how much 2 ounces of shaved ham actually looks like.  Or, how much IS an ounce of sunflower seeds?

I’m looking forward to it and can’t wait to get some good use out of it!

If you are lucky enough to have an Asian market near you and have been too intimidated to walk in (yes, it can be intimidating, especially if it’s laid out so the first thing you see are live turtles.) go do it anyway.  They’re great places to just wander around if nothing else.  You may very well stumble across that sauce or spice or snack you’ve had before somewhere and have never been able to find anywhere else.

But today I had errands to run that had me right there, so I had to pop in, if for no other reason than chopsticks, as I’ve just about exhausted my supply that I bought in Chinatown a while back.  Let’s face it, there are just some things that really should be eaten with chopsticks:  Chinese take out, Japanese sticky rice, Ramen and Soba just to start with.  And I like all these things, so I need chopsticks.

This market also happens to have a great little housewares section with tons of cups and bowls and plates and a positively dizzying array of rice cookers.  I picked up a couple proper bowls for sticky rice (or miso) and a couple plates that will make perfect spoon rests, even if that wasn’t the original intent of the designer:

Then to the chopsticks.  Picked up a pack of metal ones, and a couple packs of what I thought were wooden, except I now realize they are plastic.  So, I am set for chopsticks until I die.  (The plastic ones were incredibly cheap, so there are still no worries over losing one in a lunchbag or in the garbage disposal.)  I almost made the mistake of getting Korean ones, which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but they’re more oval shaped than round and a little harder to use, and I don’t feel like accidentally flinging ramen across the room.

On to the noodle aisle – because I can. :)  Spied some Soba noodles with the bonus of English cooking directions on the back.  (My knowledge of Kanji is non-existent.  3 years in Japan and I was still doing good to be able to sound out Katakana symbols, the most basic of the language.)  Now, just to figure out how to season them properly!  (I’m already thinking cooking in chicken stock might be a good place to start.)

Of course I had to hit the candy aisle.  And of course I had to grab a box of Pocky.

And some orange bubblegum that I used to get all the time when we were overseas.  (It’s just like Chiclets, but better somehow.)

Now, I’m off to enjoy some sticky rice the way it supposed to be enjoyed:

(Let’s just pretend that the Mountain Dew I’ll be drinking with it is a traditional cold accompaniment for sticky rice.)