What if you could cook more efficiently, using a fraction of the energy that your stove top uses, and reduce the chances of anyone in your kitchen ever burning a hand on the stove top? All you need is an induction burner so you can start cooking with magnets.

I learned about induction burners from this Gizmodo article. Instead of using heat from gas or electricity, induction burners use the magnetic field to heat food. A current passing through the metal of the pan generates the necessary heat.

Why should anyone bother with this? For one thing, food cooks faster on an induction burner. According to Gizmodo, “Induction burners convert about 85% of the energy you pour into them into heat, compared to about 70% for electric burners and 40% for gas.” The increased efficiency is going into the food, which means quicker cooking time. It also means lower electricity/gas bills because this method doesn’t waste as much energy.

But the weird thing, while the pan gets hot on the induction burner, the burner itself stays cool. You can touch it with your hand while you’re sizzling an egg. Fascinating.

The burners are surprisingly affordable, so much so that I was fantasizing about getting one. Here’s one for $77 and another for $119. If this became one of your chief cooking methods, you would make that money back on the gas bill in no time.

I get so many tomatoes by the end of the harvest season that it no longer makes any sense to freeze them. So I decided to try dehydrating them in my oven.

It worked out pretty well. I ended up with a jar of sundried tomatoes that have come in handy in Italian cooking. I plan to do it again this year too.

To dehydrate the tomatoes, I first cut them in half and lay them out on a tray, like so:

I happened to have a lot of Roma tomatoes, which are ideal for dehydrating, but I also tried some larger tomatoes, and they worked out just as well.

After I cut them up, I put them in the oven:

I set the oven on the lowest temperature–175 degrees–and left them in there. It took hours to dehydrate the tomatoes. I think I put them in around 9 a.m. in the morning and they came out at 8 p.m. at night, so around 11 hours. I knew they were done because the tomatoes had shriveled up to a fruit-leather-like consistency.

Really, it was extremely easy to do. The resulting tomatoes taste exactly like the store-bought sundried tomatoes, only a little sweeter. I suppose you could fix that by adding some salt.

Mark my words, someday I will have a secret bookcase doorway in my house. So I love the execution of it in this New York apartment tour–faux bookcase as closet door:

The house owner, Lorin, also has similar solutions for a mirror and medicine cabinet in her bathroom, only in those cases she hides them behind paintings. Since her apartment is 400 square feet, she probably needs all the space she can get. But on top of that, the faux doors continue the cohesive look of her apartment, which is kind of like a tiny Versailles.

I also love her kitchen tile:

I bought 10 quail eggs for $1.29 at Whole Foods the other day. I had never cooked with them before, although I’ve had them a few times in restaurants.

I was a little nervous playing with them because I had recently tried some duck eggs and didn’t like them. The duck eggs were a lot like chicken eggs only more gamy–they would be okay to cook with, but not very tasty by themselves.

But quail eggs, I was relieved to find, are different. They are maybe even a little better tasting than chicken eggs, plus they are adorable. I decided to poach them and put them in a bistro salad for dinner.

I poached three quail eggs in balsamic vinegar and put it on a bed of fresh figs, croûtons, Gorgonzola cheese, and red leaf lettuce that had been tossed with the same balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

It was yummy. The only thing I would do differently is to use a better kind of lettuce next time–maybe arugula?

I also tried the quail eggs in this recipe, only I tweaked a bit, using lentils instead adzuki beans and regular olive oil instead of pumpkin seed oil. It was yummy.

So, verdict: I like quail eggs.

Who knew? Growing a square watermelon is simply a matter of growing it inside a hinged cube. The melon conforms to the mold as it grows.

Instructables has a how-to for growing square melons. It’s kind of cool, although not particularly useful for anything other than stacking the melons better.

(Image courtesy Wikipedia)

The other day, I went into a heirloom seed store, which happens to be down the street from my house, and took a look around. I was excited to see they carried stevia seeds. I had recently looked around on the Internet for a way to purchase this rare herb but didn’t find any sources, so I was happy to find the seeds so close to home. Unfortunately, it’s too late to plant them, so I will either try to grow the plant indoors or wait until spring.

(I have since discovered that this page sells stevia.)

Stevia is a natural sugar substitute. Apparently, it is 300 times sweeter than sugar! I can’t even imagine what that would taste like, but I am deeply intrigued. It has none of the calories of sugar, which means you can eat sweets made with it and not gain weight.

How safe is stevia? Pretty safe. It’s nontoxic and countries like Japan have been using it as a sugar substitute for years. As with most herbs, the FDA doesn’t seem to have a strong position on it, which is fine with me. Like anything, it’s probably not meant to be consumed in mass quantities, which would not be possible with one or two plants anyway. Better yet, it is a natural alternative to the artificial sweeteners we use in diet foods, which have been manipulated in a lab with who-knows-what chemicals. I would rather eat an herb than chlorinated sugar any day.

All that to say, I think I’m going to try growing the plant indoors and see how it fares. If it doesn’t make it, I can always try again in the spring. I don’t know whether I will like it how stevia tastes once its grows, but that’s the fun in gardening–seeing how a plant works from the seed on up.

For a long time now, I have considered using a Diva Cup or The Keeper. They are “menstrual alternatives” to using pads during your period. Here is what the DivaCup looks like:

A friend of mine recently bought a DivaCup and seems to be enjoying it. I will let the DivaCup people explain how it works:

The DivaCup a non-absorbent menstrual cup that simply collects menstrual flow. It is inserted in the vagina and sits at the lower base of the vaginal canal. It is worn internally, yet because it is soft and smooth, it cannot be felt nor will it leak when inserted properly.

The DivaCup is the most clean and convenient method of feminine hygiene protection. No need to touch the flow. It is worn low in the vagina, not near the cervix, so it is easy to remove. No mess!

A couple of thoughts on these:

They seem efficient. In general, it is satisfying to me to find one gadget that can do the job of many other gadgets. That’s the idea here–you are replacing something disposable with something reusable, and as a consequence you spend less money overall and get to mess with less stuff. In this case, I wouldn’t have to store all those pads and tampons under the bathroom sink anymore. That would be cool.

They are much more earth friendly. The biggest advantage to a menstrual alternative is that it’s more environmentally responsible. Pads are a problem in landfills. The average American women will use between 10,000 and 15,000 disposable pads, tampons, and applicators in a lifetime. About “6.5 billion tampons and 13.5 billion sanitary pads, plus their packaging, ended up in landfills or sewer systems in 1998,” according to waste consultancy Franklin Associates. It takes 500 years for them to decompose. On top of that, all those pads and tampons have to be manufactured, which takes up resources and energy and blah blah blah. By contrast, with the DivaCup/Keeper you have one thing that can be used over and over again for years. Clearly, that is less wasteful overall.

But do they really save that much money? I am not saying this isn’t frugal, but it doesn’t seem like these alternatives would save as much money as is claimed. The DivaCup website says women spend $200 a year on pads. How does that happen, exactly? A bag of pads cost $5. I use half a bag in a month, so that is $2.50 a month. That means I spend $30 a year on pads. According to their calculations, the average woman spends $17 a month on pads, which means they are either going through almost four bags of pads in a month, or they are buying some pretty fancy pads.

The DivaCup and The Keeper both cost around $35. The Keeper is guaranteed for 10 years, or $.30 a month. That means I’m saving about $2.20 a month using it instead of pads. That’s not nothing, but it isn’t saving over $16 a month either. However, these menstrual alternatives would pay for themselves over time.

The people I know who use these alternatives seem happy with them. They swear they don’t leak and are more comfortable than pads. There is also the issue of the supposed toxicity of pads/tapons, caused by chlorine and other chemicals used in their manufacturing. I don’t know if rubber or silicone is necessarily less toxic, but it could be.

I guess what I’m saying is, I would like to try a menstrual alternative. But I’m not sure I want to shell out $35 for one yet.

Have you tried one?

Using allll the deodorant, from The Tightwad Gazette:

After years of feeling cheated by not being able to get that last little bit of solid antiperspirant deodorant out of the container, I finally decided it was time to try.

I dug all the remaining stuff out of the container with a knife and put it in a glass custard cup. I put it in the microwave for two minutes. Using a spatula, I scraped all the melted antiperspirant into an old container and let it cool. Four used-up antiperspirant containers filled a recycled container half full.

From Sally Ryan, Black Hawk, Colorado

Huh. Well, it takes me months and months to go through one container of deodorant, so it would take me years to get that one half-filled container this way. But if you go through deodorant quickly, this might be worth a try.

I like these mustache glasses. Very cool, although a bit pricey at $15 per glass.

Once I was walking in Paris and stopped in front of a store window to admire the most beautiful lampshades ever. They were made out of layers and layers of ribbons. I wanted to buy them, but the store was closed, and I didn’t end up going back that way during my stay. But I have thought about them since then.

It never occurred to me to use ribbon upholstery on a chair, but it did to Diane Durkes at Homeworkshop.com, who turned this beat up chair from this:

To this:

She did a really nice job. Apparently the inspiration came from $2,300 chairs from Dransfield & Ross. Diane’s chair cost $150 for supplies and looks like it cost a lot more than that.