You Can't Have Too Many Grills, Can You?

Every so often, Karen's employer holds a silent auction at work, with the proceeds benefiting local charities. This past Thursday marked another such occasion. Knowing that the money would be going to a good cause, Karen took a quick break from work and went downstairs to check out what was available. Among the items up for bid was a MasterBuilt 7 in 1 Smoker and Grill. Seeing that no one had yet bid on this, Karen put down an offer. She figured that if she won this, she would just give it to me. (Aww, that's very nice of you, sweetie!)

Well, guess what? She won the smoker, along with every other item on which she bid. (And she bid on a lot of stuff!) We're going to be over in the neighborhood for a birthday party this weekend, so we'll probably drop by the office to pick up that 50 pound box.

With the acquisition of the smoker, we now have four grilling/smoking/BBQ apparatuses between the two of us. In addition to the smoker, we have:

• A Black Weber 22 1/2-Inch One-Touch Silver Kettle Grill: a gift from Karen's mom and dad which she hauled back from the Poconos a few years back


• A Blue Weber One-Touch Gold Kettle Grill: a 5 year anniversary gift from my employer; I actually have the 18 inch version


• A Char Broil Quickset EvenFlame 30,000 BTU Grill: not exactly this model, but one of its predecessors

Good thing that I haven't pick up one of these Brinkmann electric smokers as I have been thinking about doing...

The Vino-Seal

Over the past few years, several types of stoppers have emerged as alternatives to the traditional wine cork. Many of us are familiar with synthetic corks, which are becoming fairly commonplace, as well as screwtop enclosures, often associated with the cheap wine from our college days. (Night Train, anyone?)

The January 2007 issue of Bon Appetit has a short article on the Vino-Seal, a glass stopper with a sealing o-ring. This innovative stopper, created by the German subsidiary of Alcoa, forms a very tight seal with the bottle, preventing cork taint and oxidation. It is very easy to open, without requiring a separate opener, and reseals very nicely. Several different U.S. wine producers are using the Vino-Seal, including Whitehall Lane in Napa and Sineann Winery in Oregon. I first encountered this award-winning gadget during one of my trips to Europe, where it is known as the Vino-Lok. I still have several bottles of wine from Weingut Heitlinger in my wine rack sealed with the Vino-Lok.

It seems that the Vino-Seal has not been as widely adopted as other types of stoppers due to the cost of the stopper itself as well as the labor costs in manually sealing the bottles. However, if these cost issues can be resolved, I think that we might see more and more wineries using the Vino-Seal in the future.

Clacking eggs

One of the birthday gifts that my sweetie gave me this year was a Clack Egg Cracker. For those of you unfamiliar with this marvel of German engineering, the Clack is used to cut the top off your hard (or soft) cooked eggs. You place the stainless steel cap on the top of your egg and drop the 70 gram ball down the 16 centimeter shaft. Then 0.181 seconds later, the ball, having attained a velocity of 1.77 meters per second, hits the egg shell with 0.6867 newtons of force, leaving a perfect crack around the top without damaging the rest of the egg.

With this gadget, it becomes relatively easy to make Arpège eggs, the dish created by Alain Passard for his Parisian L'Arpège Restaurant. The cleverly engineered concoction consists of a seasoned egg yolk, coddled its shell and combined with a mixture of crème fraîche, sherry vinegar, chives, and maple syrup. It is a surprisingly delightful dish that I first sampled at David Kinch's Manresa Restaurant. Last weekend, I tried my hand at making some Arpège eggs. Here are the results:

Egg yolks in shell seasoned with fleur de sel and ground white pepper with chives:


Coddling the eggs:


Voilà!