Demy Digital Recipe Reader

We’ve all heard how the latest netbook, smartphone or even Nintendo DS can double as a recipe book in the kitchen. But if you’ve actually dragged any of these fragile digital gadgets into the realm of splatter and spray, you’ve surely discovered their main problem. They get dirty. And unless you want to be puffing flour out of the speakers on your laptop and degreasing the buttons on your phone with a rag full of Lysol afterward, you have to be really careful with them.

The new Demy digital recipe reader has been designed to resolve that problem with a design its builders are ready to call “kitchen-safe.” That means it’s both splash-resistant and, due to its lack of nooks and crannies, easy to clean by wiping it down with a damp cloth. And though the 7-inch monitor looks like a space hog, it has the same footprint as a 3 x 5 card after you prop it up on the countertop.

Besides acting as a digital index of recipes (both your own and those on KeyIngredient.com), the Demy also fills in for other kitchen gadgets with three different timers to keep tabs on different foods, a conversion calculator to swap between different measurements, and even a list of potential substitutes for ingredients you don’t have.

The Demy is available immediately through Amazon for $300. Though that’s a lot of money for one device, this one’s no unitasker (to borrow a term from Alton Brown), and it might just be worth it to save your other electronics from the danger of kitchen drudgery. More information can be found at the Demy Web site.