Frozen ravioli is a perfect fallback for an "I don't want to cook" meal. I recently tried the Italian Three-Meat Ravioli from My Nonni's Italian Foods, which contains veal, pork, and beef. The ravioli had a great, firm texture and a nice balance of seasonings. In fact, they were better than the ones at the fancy Italian deli in my neighborhood and the local pizza-and-pasta joint that I sometimes fr...

The Olafur Eliasson exhibit wasn't the only reason to trek out to New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center this summer: The museum has recently unveiled Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), a tubular structure made of sustainable materials that serves as both urban farm and social hangout. It uses only solar energy (including its mobile phone charging station), collects rain water for irrigation, and includes an...

As a former pastry chef and avid home baker, I spend a lot of time with my stand mixer. And as any fellow baker knows, there isn't a recipe that won't require you to stop and scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl and paddle attachment at some point. But some ingenious person at SideSwipe has now developed a paddle-spatula combo attachment, acting as a standard mixer blade that scrapes the sides...

You'll be loved for giving a gift of cast iron: It lasts forever, cooks evenly on any surface, and won't warp. I'm really liking these new offerings: Staub's Honeycomb line has dimples on the cooking surface that keep food from sticking to the pan and make cleaning up easy. And Lodge's Color line not only looks good, but also costs considerably less than its competitors. Lodge Color Enamel Dutch Ov...

Wine bottles get messy, and because retailers and restaurants can't sell them with stained, crooked, or outdated labels, an alternate outlet was needed. Enter the Accidental Wine Company, which scoops up the less than perfect bottles and offers them cheaply via its Web site. The only downside is that you never know exactly what you're going to get. Because the inventory is so random, you can reques...