Enter for a Chance to Win Cool Tools

By Sandy Hu
A new video for Video Friday

Everyone can use some new kitchen tools – especially this time of year when we’re all in a cooking and baking frenzy. So Special Fork has made it an annual holiday tradition to offer a sweepstakes package of cool kitchen tools. Dave and I go out to shop personally to make the selections, asking at cookware stores about the hot sellers. This year’s prize package retails for $122.

Today, I’m showing you what we hand-picked for this year’s lucky Special Fork sweepstakes winner. To enter, please go to our Facebook page.

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Special Fork’s Holiday Gift Guide

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

As a family of food lovers, specialty food and kitchen tools often make their way into our Christmas stockings or under the tree.

Steve and I already have a well-equipped kitchen but Steve is a serious amateur cook. So the boys and I give him cookbooks or high-end kitchen tools for Christmas.

Dave and his wife Lynn are fairly recently married and are still building their “batterie de cuisine.” Last year one of the presents we gave Dave was a Le Creuset Dutch oven – the larger ones are so expensive, it’s nice to get one for a gift.

Chris lives in a tiny apartment in Queens in New York. He’d rather figure work-arounds than stock the appropriate tools, so even the pop-up colander was returned after Christmas. He’d as soon drain his pasta using a pot cover. Still, Chris is the most likely one to slip foodstuffs into our stockings. Traveling for work or vacation, he brings back treasures, such as canned French foie gras or Hungarian paprika for us.

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Must-Have Kitchen Tools

By Andrew Hunter

My “must have kitchen gadgets” are centered on citrus, which is my favorite ingredient. I love lemons, limes and oranges, and all their variations like Meyer lemons, key limes and blood oranges. The nuances in both the zest and the juice are delicious. The flavor of the zest is floral, while the juice is acidic. As most of us are trying to watch or reduce our weight, citrus is an ideal way to enhance flavor without added calories, fat or sodium.

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Tools that Deliver

By Lori Powell

There is nothing more satisfying than a kitchen tool that delivers...both in design and function. We are inundated by all sorts of must-have gadgets for our kitchen.

My personal requirements are that a tool must have several functions: be sturdy, be easy to clean and easy to store. Most of all, the tool must live up to its advertised promise of making my cooking tasks easier and quicker in order for me to be sold.

I have many food styling tools that I adore but only a handful of kitchen tools. Below are just a few of them:

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Old School Tools

By Katie Barreira

As Woody Allen points out in his most recent film, Midnight in Paris, it simply isn’t healthy to pine away for the past, while eschewing the marvels of the present. When applied to kitchen tools, this theory holds only somewhat true.

I certainly wouldn't want to live in a world in which it was necessary to cream butter and sugar without an electric mixer. And while it’s clear that many newfangled gadgets (the asparagus peeler comes to mind) were invented with the sole purpose of having something else to sell, the modernization of kitchen tools has, on the whole, been hugely beneficial to the cook.

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