Kitchen aids for the blind cook

The best revenge is success. In this case, it’s success in the kitchen. With the festive holidays around the corner, everybody’s got entertaining on the brain. As a visually impaired home cook, you can succeed this holiday season with a little help from a few friendly tools.On my show geared towards the low or no-vision cook, Four Senses, we showcase numerous tools and gadgets that make the life of a blind cook just a tad bit easier. First up, the kitchen thermometer and iGrill from iDevices. These are tools that use Bluetooth technology to connect to your iPhone or iPad, making temperature reading more convenient. Because Apple products are accessible for the blind via VoiceOver, the iDevices app capitalized on this capability and made an accessible app which reads aloud the degrees on the thermometer via your iPad or iPhone’s VoiceOver.Although especially useful for the blind cook, fully sighted people can take advantage of its function as well. The hubs has the kitchen thermometer hanging on our oven, ready for use the next time we roast a lamb shank or duck. Because of the Bluetooth, he can recline on the couch and watch football, checking the iDevices app on his iPhone during commercial breaks to see how the meat’s coming along. You can also set temperature alarms so you’ll know when the rack of lamb has hit 140°F and ready to come out of the oven.Another tool featured on “Four Senses” is the Pen Friend. This device is a stylus that, when placed over a coded sticker, will read aloud a personal pre-recorded message. Placing the small stickers on pantry items such as canned goods or spices help you audibly identify the product.I think this might also come in handy in the closet. I have stacks of denim jeans, but I don’t know which is which because they’re generally similar in color and design. I could record, “green J. Crew jeans,” on a sticker, place it on an index card, slip the card into the back pocket of my green J. Crew jeans, and voila!If you ask most chefs what's the one kitchen tool they can’t live without, most would say it’s their knife. My first set of knives with which I learned to cook some 15 years ago was an inexpensive Chefmate set from Wal-mart. After I’d graduated college and begun making a little money, I upgraded to Henckels. These I used quite a few years until I did MasterChef, and then the hubs bought me my first Japanese hand-forged Asai 9” chef’s knife with which I fell so in love, I ended up buying three more of varying sizes and functions.While the Asai knives are my predominant knives, I also have some Ergo Chef knives. I frequently use the serrated bread knife and tongs and find them pretty durable and comfortable.Beyond physical tools are virtual ones in the form of apps, which prove quite useful for the home cook in gathering recipe ideas, reference materials, and ingredient lists. Check out these iPhone apps for the home cook from the Kitchn. (Are all of them accessible? Not sure. Why don't you check them out and let us know in the comments.) Don’t forget about the recipe source, All Recipes (its app is accessible), and a favorite in our household, Serious Eats.Then, of course, there are the textured stickers I use on my stove knobs and appliances to help me decipher which button or setting is which. Rubber bump dots are stuck on the high and medium settings on all four of my burner knobs. (I don’t need stickers on the “ignite” or “simmer” settings as the former, like many gas stoves, causes a clicking noise, and the latter is simply turning the knob all the way counterclockwise until it can go no further.) I also have these bumped dots on the START and number 5 on my microwave (similar to how the 5 is marked on almost all number pads you come across: ATMs, telephones, etc.). My oven is marked on ON, temperature settings, HEAT, and OFF. The hubs used Sugru to mark the 4 oz. level on our liquid measuring cup; It's withstood dishwashing cycles.As a blind cook yourself, what other tips and tools do you have in your kitchen? What is your can’t-live-without kitchen tool? What kind of knives do you favor? And which apps do you find useful, whether sighted or not? Enlighten us.