Since I am in Oregon City at my parent’s house, I haven’t been cooking since my wonderfully talented mother does it so well! Tonight we had chicken fajitas and an overwhelmingly spicy corn dish with berry cobbler for dessert, it was great! She’s such a champ. But all of her delicious work has left me with little to blog about (except to brag about my amazing mom) so I thought I’d share some fun cooking gadgets and tools I’ve discovered.

I love Stumbleupon. I spend an embarrassing amount of time “stumbling” each day and I find all sorts of recipes and new things to use while cooking. The other day, I found a store in Portland that sells chocolate and salt called The Meadow. What I found interesting was a product called Himalayan Salt Blocks which are used to cook or serve food on. The blocks are literally what they sound like- big blocks of salt.

You can chill them and serve cold food such as fruit or sushi on them, or you can heat them on the stove and cook meat and vegetables on them. They can even be used for curing.

From what I’ve read, they give a very unique flavor to food, beyond just salt because of the variety of minerals found in the blocks. According to their website, which even offers cooking instructions, no other seasoning is needed! I’m a big fan of marinades and rubs, so I’ll need to taste it to believe it, which I look forward to doing. The blocks are reasonably priced at around $20, so I’ll have to go pick one up, and maybe sample some chocolate while I’m there 🙂

This week, I found one of the best applications I’ve seen in awhile. Seriously, I spent hours on it this week, and am so, so happy I discovered it (and not through Stumbleupon!). It’s an application called YummySoup! and it has made my life so much simpler. As I’ve said, almost all of the recipes I find (at least the ones that aren’t a result of me spending the day experimenting in the kitchen) are from Stumbleupon, resulting in me having “liked” (or adding to my favorites) over 700 websites. Unfortunately, Stumbleupon doesn’t offer any real means of organizing favorites, and the search function doesn’t work very well, so I often have difficulty finding what I’m looking for. YummySoup! is essentially a digital cookbook that features a “web exporter”, allowing you to easily store recipes from any website (and organize them any way you like!). With common recipe hosting websites such as All Recipes and Martha Stewart, you can simply press a button that says “Import” and it does all the work for you. On less known websites such as blogs, you simply highlight a portion, of the recipe and click the corresponding title. For example, highlight ingredients and press the button at the top of the browser that says ingredients.

So easy! Now I can actually try all of the recipes I browse during the day! I only have 12 days left for my free trial, but I think it will be worth purchasing. Want to try it out yourself? Check it out here.
I find that I constantly have my laptop with me in the kitchen, and have unfortunately spilled my fair share of ingredients on the poor thing. Next I’ll have to find something to protect my poor, overworked computer.
I am an avid user of All Recipes because I like the rating system and reviews. What are some of your favorite websites to find recipes?