Williams-Sonoma

Handmade chicken coop

Williams-Sonoma brings to mind beautiful china, gourmet kitchen tools and pricey pots and pans. Chicken coops? Not so much.

But handmade hen houses are part of a new line of home and garden goods, launched last spring. The avian abodes are made by several vendors, including Laughing Chickens, a Northern California company.

"Our agrarian collection offers products that support a lifestyle of healthy living and brings the virtues of homegrown and homemade into our customers' everyday lives," a Williams-Sonoma spokesperson told us in an email.

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Firebox.com

Gamepad Chopping Board

The original Nintendo controller -- so simple, so rectangular -- is a touchstone of nostalgia for many of us, a reminder of a time when two simple red buttons were all you needed to jump, shoot, and beat Bowser at Mario's own game. UK company Firebox takes us back to the time of Nintendo thumbs with its Gamepad Chopping Board ($23), designed like the ever classic controller.

It's not an exact duplicate, as the designers carefully and artfully considered what exactly you would be controlling: where the original Nintendo logo was placed, you have a cartoonish sliced carrot instead. And rather than the "Select" and "Start" printed on the controller, you have the slightly less motivating verbs "Slice" and "Dice."

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S. Bonar

Ask any women's magazine, and they will tell you with sadistic glee that it is "bikini season." But fortunately, companies have come up with a plethora of food-like products that claim to help you lose weight without all that tiresome dieting and exercising. One item, called Skinny Beach Sticks, even purports to help you get tan and lose weight. Another, SlenderPops, promises to melt the pounds off while you suck on a fruit-flavored lollipop. (Lollipops for weight loss; that's kind of like cigarettes for lung disease.)

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We've had deals from L.A.-based BlackboardEats hitting our inbox since it launched late last year, and now the site, which provides discounts at restaurants in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco to its subscribers, along with restaurant reviews and other bonuses, has expanded to include an online shopping feature that can be enjoyed by virtually everyone.

BlackboardEats.com "Everywhere" debuted today, which gives anyone with a computer and a credit card the opportunity to save money on food, cookware and supplies purchased online. Those who sign up for the free weekly newsletter are sent a passcode that, if used within 48 hours, will get them a discount on whatever the special of the week may be - whether it's foodstuffs, kitchenware or a reduced price at a culinary travel destination.

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May Wah

The many flavors of fake

The vegan chef de cuisine has three options when planning his animal-free menu. First, ignore mock-meat entirely and serve tofu as tofu and vegetables as vegetables, without subterfuge. Such is the approach at M Cafe de Chaya, those green tendrils sprouting from the Chaya empire's trunk, where plants and plant-based protein are allowed to stand more or less on their own merits. Second, roll your own un-meat. Sometimes it pays off. Sometimes--as in the laborious, inscrutable doppelganger dishes on the menus of Native Foods and Real Food Daily--it doesn't. Finally, if you are a Thai or Vietnamese or Chinese cook of principled Buddhist extraction, toiling perhaps at the growing cluster of Happy Families in Monterey Park and Rosemead, you order from May Wah.

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Last fall we checked in with Jim Duffy, the San Diego man who grows some of the world's hottest chiles in his back yard. Recently, when we called him up again to see what he was growing, he agreed to give us a recipe that uses his chiles. This seemed liked like a good idea, given the fact that he's got a new crop of Bhut Jolokias, Trinidad 7 Pots, Malaysian Goronongs and Trinidad Scorpions, and that if you should find yourself in possession with some of these insanely hot chiles, you should probably know what to do with them. Sure, you can try eating them whole, videoing the experience and posting the results on YouTube, but there are other, more gastronomically satisfying (and saner) things you can do with them too.

Duffy, who runs the website Super Hot Chiles--where you can buy the fresh chiles if you're interested--told us a little about the Bhut Jolokia, or ghost chile, and gave us his recipe for Bhut Jolokia fish curry. Turn the page...

Jim Duffy

Bhut Jolokia chiles

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Photo credit: Amy Scattergood

La Nogalera walnut stand

Between Buellton and Lompoc in Santa Barbara County, about 11 miles from the ocean on the inland side of the Santa Ynez Mountains, you'll find Rancho La Viña--and some of the best walnuts in this part of the country. This pleasant fact is particularly noteworthy at the moment, as the 2009 walnut crop is promising to be unusually good. Which makes for good nuts. And for even better walnut oil.

Rancho La Viña, a family owned and operated ranch on 2,800 acres, has been growing walnuts--and 60 acres of Pinot Noir grapes--since 1869. Their La Nogalera oil (La Nogalera is a partership between three area ranches) is made from three different varieties of walnuts, mostly from coastal Payne walnuts. This year the cooler nights have made for a particularly buttery crop with slightly lower acidity. The walnuts will be harvested in the next month, then husked and dried and, because they're organic, briefly cured. After this process, in which the walnuts are cooled down close to freezing, they'll be shelled and then packaged or pressed. This year's new batch of walnut oil will be ready by Christmas.

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Back in May we previewed Domaine LA, the brick and mortar incarnation of the online wine shop Domaine 547. After several months of construction, owner Jill Bernheimer has put the bottles in the racks, opened the doors for a few hours this past weekend for a soft test run, and is now ready for the store's official opening.

Photo credit: Jessica Ritz

All about the wine and great design: Domaine LA.

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CBS.com

Andy Rooney

At the end of a 60 Minutes show, Andy Rooney takes his time to complain about stuff. I guess you get to do that when you've been around as long as he has. Once, though, he did something rather fascinating: he emptied out his kitchen drawers and complained about all the useless junk inside. Like antediluvian junk. Circa the Hoover administration at least. He had egg slicers and olive pitters and strange metal contraptions the uses for which have long been forgotten. Then, after his griping, he returned everything to the drawer and, the implication was clear, put it all back in the kitchen. Which is an interesting object lesson.

We all have, lurking in our kitchen drawers, strange and wonderful things. But how useful are they? OXO vegetable peelers and microplanes: very useful. Sushi mats and pastry brushes: maybe. Gnocchi boards and meat pounders: not so much. Here's one tool that you may have rolling around in the back of the drawer, or maybe impaled in that Henckels Four Star 9-Piece Block Set like some Arthurian metaphor. A sharpening steel.

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Our visual culture is gradually approaching a Blade Runner-like vision of Los Angeles, with advertisements that continually push the boundaries of acceptable placement. And as anyone who's glanced at a newspaper in the last few months here knows, it touches a real nerve. Or ask any City Councilmember or Planning Commissioner who weathered the storm of constituent opinions during the recent city sign ordinance revision process.

So why is a website that sells cooking equipment seeking publicity on a City of L.A. public park drinking fountain?

Photo credit: Jessica Ritz

Drinking fountain at Pan Pacific Park, AKA recruiting station for eager home cooks.

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