Nesting measuring cups

I just saw a French movie called Russian Dolls (Poupées Russes), so I must have had nesting dolls on my mind. These nesting measuring cups—from my favorite crazy store, Perpetual Kid—are designed like Russian matryoshkas. There are 6 of them, starting with a 1-cup measure, and working down to a 1/4 cup. It has both 2/3- and 3/4-cup measures, which is nice.

The set of M-Cups costs $12, but they won't be available until early September.

Organic lip balm

I'm not much for make-up, but I am addicted to lip balm. I have a million brands and I am always on the look-out for something new.

Odd to have this in a food blog? Well, lip balm is intended for your mouth, with which you EAT, and these organic balms from eos come in flavors that sound good enough to EAT: Summer Fruit, Honeysuckle Honeydew, Sweet Mint.

I want them for their looks alone. The bonus is they're 100% natural, paraben-free, widely available, and about $3. Eos also makes balm in stick form with 2 more food flavors: Vanilla Bean and Pomegranate Raspberry.

A final note: On the eos website, their promotion for the lip balms includes this claim: "precisely glides onto lips." Huh? As opposed to that uncontrollable and imprecise Chapstick?

Pork & Mango Salad

Not that it was my intention, but this salad just happens to be overflowing with beta-carotene, the pigment that makes fruits and vegetables orange. Beta-carotene has been identified as a powerful antioxidant compound, but it is also a precursor* to vitamin A, which is good for your eyes, skin and immune system.

There is no recommended intake for beta-carotene itself, but to get the vitamin A your body needs, you should consume 11 grams of beta-carotene daily. A single serving of this salad has over 13 grams!

Pork & Mango Salad
Make this in the morning (before it gets super hot), then at dinner time you won't have to heat up the kitchen. Serve it on a bed of greens if you want, along with toasted slices of whole-grain baguette or sourdough.

1 pound pork tenderloin
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 pound sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
3/4 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1/2 teaspoon grated lime zest
3 tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 large red bell peppers, diced
4 scallions, thinly sliced
2 mangoes (3/4 pound each), cut into 1/2-inch cubes

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Sprinkle the pork with 1/2 teaspoon of the salt and 1/2 teaspoon of the black pepper. Place in a roasting pan and roast for 20 to 25 minutes or until cooked through but still juicy. When cool enough to handle, cut into 1/2-inch cubes. (Save the meat juices to add to the dressing.)
2. Meanwhile, in a vegetable steamer, cook the sweet potatoes until firm-tender, 10 to 15 minutes.
3. In a large bowl, combine the yogurt, lime zest, lime juice, honey, cayenne, the remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. (Add the meat juices, too.)
4. Add the pork, sweet potatoes, bell peppers, scallions and mangoes, and toss well. Serve at room temperature or chilled.
Makes 4 servings

*Your body converts the beta-carotene to vitamin A. You can also get preformed vitamin A in animal-based foods, such as egg yolks and liver.

Salt and pepper for college

A little while ago my son and I were assembling a "Dorm-Room Survival Kit" for a friend who is heading off to college this fall. The kit included a white board for hanging on your door (intended to receive hilarious messages from friends), a bin for holding all the random things that don't have any other place to be, a corkscrew, sticky stuff for hanging posters, a paring knife and this dandy set of travel salt and pepper grinders.

Made of heavy-duty stainless steel, the GRIND on the GO mills are 4 inches high and have their own little leather pouch. You can buy them on the GRIND website for $45. Or, you can get the cheaper version of the same idea in plastic instead of stainless for $20.

Yummy tarts from the freezer

I wouldn't have predicted that the words tart + freezer would equal yummy, but I was more than pleasantly surprised to find out that in the case of the Daphne Baking Company the equation works.

The tarts come in six flavors: lemon, chocolate, macadamia nut, pumpkin, chocolate-raspberry and passion fruit (my personal addiction). They're two to a box for $7 to $8. This seems like a pretty small price to pay to end a meal in great style without having to do all that work. Just take them out of the freezer to come to room temp while you eat dinner.

Daphne's tarts are currently only available in the Northeast, including at many Whole Foods, so check their store locator. However, if you really, really, really wanted to have these tarts, you could order them by the case (12 tarts) for $88 from the Daphne Baking Company website. The cost of the case includes overnight delivery.

Smart measuring cup

Here's something I discovered the other day. For a completely uninteresting reason I was wondering how much water weighed. Well guess what? An ounce of water by volume (the so-called fluid ounce) actually weighs an ounce. Duh. I had not made that connection before. My grandmother's mantra in the kitchen (I mean she didn't make it up, but I learned it from her) was "a pint's a pound the world around." So 1 pint of water = 2 cups = 16 fluid ounces = 16 ounces by weight = 1 pound.

Of course the rule only works with ingredients with a density similar to water. Once you get into ingredients that don't pack into a volume measure the way water does, all bets are off. Though to be honest, the mantra will get you within shooting distance with a lot of ingredients.

Anyway, Taylor (the company that makes instant-read thermometers among other things) is coming out with a gadget that will take the guesswork away. It's a measuring cup that is also a digital scale. An LCD display in the handle tells you how much an ingredient weighs (in ounces or grams) and will also translate the weight into volume for a certain number of common ingredients (like sugar). Of course you can also just use the standard volume markings on the side of the cup if you want.

The scale weighs amounts up to 4.4 pounds and the cup holds up to 1 liter (with markings in fluid ounces and milliliters). Not even on the shelves yet, the cup has to be preordered from Amazon. It costs $30.

P.S. I love the idea of this, and it would be of incredible use to anyone who writes recipes, but it's a pretty easy guess to say it can't go in the dishwasher.