I had (still have), an old blender. I also have a stick blender and a weird one-cup smoothie blender I got as a gift. but I wanted a proper blender.

So. You've stuck a seven inch Android tablet to your cupboard. What are you gonna do with it?

Well, the obvious thing is recipes and research off the Internet. Chrome is fine for that.

At last, it can be revealed. The Secret Kitchen Project is, in fact, Techno-Kitchen 3000, AKA a cabinet-mounted tablet.

Plans are underway. Secret plans. This picture contains important components of those plans.

Just so you know.

I present to you... MEGAGRILLAZORD.

Yes, I have made good on last year's promise. If I learned to handle the grilling part properly over the course of last summer, I could get the add-on accessories for the grill - the side fire box for smoking, and the motorized rotisserie.

As a practical nerd, I have... a skepticism for high end equipment. Despite my love of geare, I tend to buy the minimum necessary to meet my needs. For a long time, that's meant spending $20-$25 on a few probe thermometers and stick thermometers that I've never been quite happy with, especially when trying to judge the doneness of tricky meats.

Recently, I decided to bite the bullet and see if the high end was all it was cracked up to be. And now I have a Thermapen. A proper, chefly Thermapen in fire engine red. Like this.

Well, I'll be damned.

So Cathy's sister sent me this... thing around Christmastime. It is a roughly three inch square of, I shit you not, CHAIN MAIL. As a D&D nerd who's spent time around SCA as well, I'm very familiar with chain mail. So why did I get a square of it in the mail?

Apparently, to clean my cast-iron pans.

It's still been pretty slow in terms of new, creative meals or dishes. I did make a nice, improvised, brothy creamy white chicken chili this week, but I didn't measure or photograph because I was improvising like mad from start to finish, and I'm not sure it came out the way anyone else would like.

And that post is now. Don't say I never gave you nothin'.

On Saturday, I bought a grill basket from the Home Depot. It is a mighty thing, roughly two thirds the size of my actual grill. I bought it because last weekend, I tried grilling green beans like Ruhlman suggested, except for the part where he suggested using a grill basket, because I didn't have one.