The standard, upright toaster. Oh hum. Not for Bodum who’s announced the Bistro Flatbed Toaster.

It lets you to defrost or toast any size of bread directly on a flat stainless steel heating surface, so you can do more than a bagel or slice of white bread. It’s great for pizza, tortillas, hamburger buns or any other oversized food item previously deemed un-toast able.

Its sleek design makes it a perfect complement to any countertop or buffet station. There’s a simple dial allowing you to specify the level of browning, and when not in use it can be stored on its side, freeing up counter space.

Buy for $80 from Amazon

But Masterbuilt has created the first indoor turkey fryer you plug into the wall. The Butterball Indoor Electric Turkey Fryer was designed to meet Underwriters Labs standards for safety. Its features include a thermostat temperature control sensor that prevents overheating and a digital timer that helps cook the turkey just right.

That leaves plenty of time to nap and watch football Thanksgiving day.

Buy for $140 from Amazon

You could drop about $300 on Dualit’s sexy beast, $200 on the always-classy Breville Smart Toaster, or $150 DeLonghi’s elegant elements.

Or you could go the smart route with Back to Basics TEM500 Egg-and-Muffin 2-Slice Toaster and Egg Poacher.

Not only does this highly rated toaster turn two perfectly good slices of bread into their hot and crusty alter-egos, it will also poach or steam eggs! In 5 minutes or so you can have a great egg sandwich read with hardly any cleanup.

Buy for around $30 from Amazon

Or, if you want something with double the capacity (or insist on spending a lot on anything in your kitchen), you can spend drop $145 on Chefscape’s 4-Slice Egg and Muffin Toaster.

It’s the first digital measuring cup and scale combination. The unit measures in weight and volume as the recipe dictates. It digitally weighs dry ingredients as well as liquid ingredients and is pre-programmed to convert weight to volume for water, milk, oil, sugar, and flour.

The weight capacity is 4.4 pounds and the volume capacity is one liter. The unit weighs in increments of mililiters, cups, fluid ounces, grams, and pounds. The plastic measuring cup runs on one long life Lithium battery that’s included and the easy-to-read LCD readout is molded into the handle.

It’s a handy tool for anyone who loves to cook and a great solution for those who don’t.

Buy standard DVD for $35 from Amazon

The answer to easy greating is the Pyrex Box Grater.

It’s slightly wider at the base so it’s much more stable than its competitors. But its real differences are these: see-through measuring marks on the side so you grate exactly the amount you need, an easy-release sliding door on the bottom to dump out your contents, and a convenient little slicer on one side to grate smaller vegetables and such.

Buy for $18 from World Kitchen

Don’t try and compare this type of filter to the ones like Brita and Pur. This filter will outlast those small charcoal pebbles by four months and is much sexier to boot. Replacement stones will run you $25, but remember they’ll last up to six months, depending on use.

And when you’re through with the rocks, you can even toss them in your back yard. How simple is that?

Buy for $85 from Design Within Reach

Kitchen connoisseurs are often skeptical of new fangled contraptions. But when it comes to grilling stuffed chile peppers those in the know will tell you it’s not easy to get ‘em to come out perfect every time.

In comes the Chile Grill. It’s a 12-inch by six-inch, stainless steel grill that holds 12 jalapeno peppers.

Core ‘em, stuff ‘em and them bake ‘em based on your recipe and they come out evenly baked and not burned on one side. The grill holds the peppers nicely and conveniently. There is no slipping, no mess, no attempting to balance the peppers on the stick. The grill is durable and washes easily.

And if Martha Stewart-like presentation is important to you, you can’t go wrong pulling this grill out of the oven and taking it right to the table.

Buy for $25 from Amazon

The answer is a heated dip and chip tray. Easily thought of, but hard to find. But eureka, we found one! It’s the Kitchen Selectives ECD-88 Electric Heated Chip and Dip Tray made buy Select Brands, Inc.

It’s got four sides to throw in chips and such with a heated center section that’s removable to clean and will automatically shut off when it’s removed. It’s AC powered so it’ll keep warm till dawn.

Buy for $40 from Amazon

Induction cooking is becoming more popular in the U.S. What is it? In simple terms it’s a burner that’s really an electromagnet. Charge the electromagnet, it builds a field, it excites molecules of food and that generates heat. So the primary difference is that in induction, it’s the pot that gets hot, not the burner, and things get hotter faster, like boiling water in under five minutes.

With the science lesson out of the way, we now present you with the result: The Fagor Portable Induction Cookstop. The Fagor single burner is portable, lightweight and powerful. It weighs seven pounds and has a temperature range of 160 to 430 degrees.

This portable hot plate – perfect for the student away at school (like my niece) – has a lot of the features you’d expect to find in a much more expensive, built-in model. Features like a built in countdown timer, six power levels, a digital touch control panel, an auto pan detector, a child lock, and an auto shut down feature.

Fagor has thought of everything in this little wonder and we were impressed by it’s quality and durability.

Buy for $200 from Amazon

But the biggest problem with garlic presses is that the mesh holes the garlic comes through are difficult to clean. Not with the Kuhn Rikon Epicurean Garlic Press. When you open it, the hopper liner flips out for easy cleaning, something we haven’t seen on any other model. Together with it being stainless steel, the people at America’s Test Kitchen voted it best garlic press in a recent test.

Buy for $38 from Amazon

What makes ‘em neat is their double-walled design that makes them heat-resistant. Translation: The glasses won’t sweat like you will on a hot summers day. The 16-ounce tumblers featured here are ideal for sipping hot or cold drinks in style.

Oh, and did I mention how attractive they are?

Buy 4 for $27 from Amazon

Buy for $12.50 from Amazon

The ingenious design of the plastic racks let you place it between rows to configure a secure and space-saving way to fit drinks in your fridge. The RakaStaka is available for not just wine bottles (as you see on the right), but for can drinks and beer bottles as well.

Buy for $10 from Amazon

Aunt Jemima would have been proud. It’s the “first automatic pancake machine intropduced into the U.S.”, or so says Seattle, Washington-based ChefStack. It’s the ChefStack automatic pancake machine and while it’s mainly for restaurants and commercial operations, a company spokesman told us by phone today, “we’ll starting selling to the public later this year.”

The microwave-sized unit uses pre-made batter that comes in pouches and cranks out four-inch diameter pancakes in about 30 seconds that are 97 percent fat-free.

The company says it’s perfect timing to introduce this $3,500 pancake shooter the America. They claim pancakes are a “comfort food” that has “experienced a resurgence over the last twelve months as a result of the economic downturn.” I’m not seeing people eating pancakes in the car like a Quarter-Pounder, but we’ll let that slide.

Buy for $3500 from ChefStack

Remember those episodes of 30 Rock where they’re trying to market GE’s new portable microwave?

It turns out it’s already been done, albeit slightly bigger than in the show (but also slightly cuter, like Tina Fey).

The iWavecube is “the world’s smallest and first personal microwave”. Perfect for dorm rooms or camp grounds, the iWavecube features 600 watts of power and can easily accommodate large mugs or bowls. It also comes in a bunch of colors and costs just $99.

Buy direct for $99 from iWavecube

You already know the formula for being healthy: eat nutritious food and exercise more.
So why are you still out of shape?

A lot of people think if they work out they can eat whatever they want. Keep telling yourself that.

The easier side of the equation is eating better. You might skip a day (or a week, or a month) at the gym, but chances are you still eat every day. So why not make it count? Oh, that’s right: because eating healthy sucks, at least that’s what your taste buds tell you when you munch on a raw beet and kale, or try to chew on some wheatgrass.

To help yourself eat more fresh fruit, vegetables, and leafy greens, you need to get a masticating juicer. Unlike your normal centrifugal juicer which basically beats the produce into submission to get its nutritious juice out, a masticating juicer simulates “chewing” the food. This lets you get out both more juice and nutrients, and makes it possible to juice leafy greens and wheatgrass.

We recently picked up Omega’s J8005 Commercial Masticating Juicer. Along with Champion, Omega is the most respected name in masticating juicers. We tried the Champion 2000+ Commercial Juicer, but despite its rugged looks prefer the Omega: it simply gets more juice out the things we throw at it.

My mornings now start off with a shot of wheat grass (add some mint and lime to make it more palatable), late-morning snack consists of an all-fruit shake (using a conventional blender), while my afternoon snack is usually a blend of spinach or kale, carrots (including the green leaves and stem, they’re the most nutritious!), a beet, some celery, and whatever else I might feel like. I add a dash of fresh ginger root (yes, you can also juice that) for flavor.

And I feel so much better for doing so.

While you’re eating nutritiously, pick up Green for Life, a ten-dollar tome anyone serious about changing their eating habits should read.

Buy Omega J8005 Commercial Masticating Juicer for $259 via Amazon

I’m referring to the Eee Top ET1602, a countertop computer with a touch screen interface that makes the included keyboard and mouse optional.

Here’s what I’m most excited about:

1. Built-in WiFi (802.11b/g/n) means I can set this bad boy up anywhere in the house.  Recipes and shopping lists with Internet radio in the kitchen?  Done.  Media center in the living room controlling access to hours of video and audio content from the Web?  Done.  Google calendar on my refrigerator?  Done!
2. Gobs of USB ports means I can hook up any external devices I want, whether it’s the Drobo for loads of external storage, an external DVD drive, or the TV tuner and capture device that could power my homebrew DVR machine.
3. Its small size and carrying handle mean I can pick it up and move it wherever I can find power for it.  I’m not stuck with it in one location simply because it’s too bulky to move.
4. Its 15.9 inch LCD screen means that, while it may not replace the monster LCD or plasma TV in the living room, it could easily serve as a smaller, more intimate entertainment device for the coffee table (it actually seems to lack video output, which could be a handy feature if you wanted to show those YouTube videos on that monster TV). 

Available in black or white, it retails for $599.  This makes it an inexpensive way to offload some of the tasks you’re using your more robust systems for.  Don’t expect to do serious work on it, but for entertainment and information, this is perfect.

I am buying this machine simply because the idea of having an Internet-based calendar easily accessible in the home for the whole family, and this calendar can do so much more.  Now if we could just perfect that wireless power idea…

ASUS Eee Top ET1602 for $599 from Amazon.com

When it comes to enhancing your kitchen, you can’t go wrong with a good knife or two, which is why we’re digging on Shun Steel’s 3.5-inch vegetable knife and 4-inch paring knife.

What make’s these Shun Steel blades so sexy? It’s not just the angled handle that’s more comfortable to use or the “VG-10 stainless-steel clad with 16 layers of SUS410 high-carbon stainless steel on each side, producing a 33 layered rust-free Damascus-look.”

It’s the price: right now, each knife is available at nearly two-thirds off via Amazon, which is pretty much unheard of. Just a month ago, these knives were selling for twice what they currently are, and there’s no telling when the prices will ratchet back up again. (Amazon sells a lot of Shun Steel blades, but only these two are currently discounted so much.)

Pick one up and feel the difference! (And don’t forget a quality sharpening steel).

4-Inch Paring Knife for $34.76 ($106.95 retail)
3.5-Inch Vegetable Knife for $31.17 ($95.95 retail)

Got a room in your house that’s always warmer than the others in summer, and always colder than the rest in the winter?

Yeah, so do I.

You need this register vent booster. I just ordered mine, and can’t wait to install it.

The idea is so simple, I can’t believe I haven’t seen it somewhere else. Basically, it creates more air flow from your normal air ducts, so that those rooms get more cold or hot air, as needed, than they would normally. And the price tag is a lot less than having an HVAC company come out and “balance” your ducts in your attic or under your house.

They cost $70 normally, but happen to be on sale right now for $60. Pick on up at ATrendyHome.com.