Daily Olive

10 Favorite Cakes & Pies for the Holidays

Great baking ideas for Thanksgiving and Christmas

Epicurious.com presents its top 10 favorite cake and pie recipes from their recipe database.  Some are just perfect for your Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas parties.  If you have your own favorite, submit your own dessert recipe to their monthly contest for different prizes each month.

Favorite cakes and pie recipes  |  via epicurious.com

Natural Kitchen Cleaning Kit from Caldrea

Caldrea cleaning products are natural, pleasant smelling, also effective way to clean your kitchen.  Lift your senses with these cleaning solutions that are blended with mint and ylang ylang oils, with a touch of citrus from oranges, lemons, and bergamot.  Keeps hands soft too.

Caldrea 3-pc. Kitchen Cleaning Set, Citrus Mint Ylang Ylang |  $29 at Cooking.com

Decant your wines easily with the Wine Funnel

Need a quick and effective way to decant your wine?  The Wine Funnel aerates your wine into e into eight separate streams helping smooth out its tannic flavor and improve the taste.  European design also includes a stainless steel filter to catch bits of cork and sediment.

Wine Funnel   |  $20 at UncommonGoods.com

Toss and Chop - easy salad preparation

Quickly prepare salads using Silvermark's Toss & Chop cutlery gadget that's designed to cut and process food right in your bowl.  Preparation is faster and simpler, and there's less clean up afterwards.  Made of stainless steel with Zytel nylon soft grip.

Silvermark Toss & Chop  |  $19 at ChefsResource.com

Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent

In Mangoes & Curry Leaves, discover exotic tastes from the vast region of the Indian Subcontinent that extends from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and down to Sri Lanka.

"The authors are regular travelers to the region, and the text often reads like a letter from a more than usually adventurous friend - a friend who know a lot about food." - From Time Magazine

Coming this fall: An hour-long documentary by award-winning director Jacques Menard. Shot from Colombo to Kandy, Mumbai to Gujarat, in urban markets and rural communities, it follows the authors as they researched, photographed, and wrote this book. For this companion volume to the award-winning Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid travel west from Southeast Asia to that vast landmass the colonial British called the Indian Subcontinent.

Mangoes & Curry Leaves:  Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent  |  $27 (40% off) at ecookbooks.com

Contemporary Bar Cabinet makes stylish statement

With understated elegance, this bar cabinet has it all--stemware storage, space for cocktail glasses and tall bottles, storage drawer for accessories, and a stainless steel protected pull-down door.  Designer Ricard Vila has even provided discreet lighting inside the oak veneered cabinet.

Otto Bar Cabinet  |  $2498 at Design Within Reach

The Joy of Slow Cooked Scrambled Eggs

The Los Angeles Times Food Section featured an article about the often neglected joy of slowly cooking your scrambled eggs.  Indeed, scrambled eggs has always been seen as a quickie meal, so we really forget that eggs become a completely different meal when cooked slowly.  Like eggs served at your favorite expensive brunch restaurant.

"If you slow things down a bit, you can turn scrambled eggs into something spectacular: Cooked very slowly, and stirred constantly, scrambled eggs can be a dish that's creamy, rich and luxurious enough to serve as a first course at an elegant dinner.

Try it once, and you may never do the quick scramble again. Try it twice, and you'll never fret again about a brunch menu."

Lower the flame, slow down the scramble and transform eggs into pure bliss  |  via LA Times

Technorati Tags:  Food and Drink

New York Bagels & Lox Gift Basket

Missing New York City?  Give yourself or close New York loved one a gift basket of New York bagels and lox. 

Zabars puts it all together the right way with their NYC Essentials Gift Basket.  You'll get an assortment of fresh-baked New York bagels, Zabar's Nova lox, plain and scallion cream cheese, Zabar's chocolate babka & rugelach, almond biscuits, Perugina Baci chocolate bar, and a pound of Zabar's ground coffee.  It's a gift basket any New Yorker or NY foodie would love.

NYC Essentials Gift Basket  |  $179 Next Day Air from Zabars.com

Scan and Cook with Beyond Smart Microwave

Scan the barcode on your food package, and the Beyond Smart Microwave Oven makes it even easier to prepare dinner.  The barcode sets the oven timing and power to the correct microwave settings and zap! - you're ready to eat.  Comes with over 4,000 UPC codes, and can be updated through the Beyond Information Network adapter.

I know it will save me the countless times of fishing the box out of the trash to reread the cooking instructions.

Beyond Smart Microwave Oven Official Website

Purchase Beyond Smart Microwave  |  $165.99 at eSalton.com

A Retro Wine Rack - The Wine Knot

The Wine Knot is designed by New York based design firm called Mint.  Made of birch and walnut plywood, the Wine Knot is a different take on the standard boxy wine rack designs out there.

Wine Knot Wine Rack  |  $100 at GreenerGrassDesign.com