High-Tech Gadgetry for Your Kitchen

When common sense fails in making meals, KitchenAttendant is there to pick up the slack.

If you’ve ever wanted to run your home kitchen like a Fortune 500 company, complete with pie charts breaking down food spoilage and inventory management, KitchenAttendant should fit your needs. The new touchscreen kiosk for your kitchen lets you keep track of what food you have at your disposal, learn new recipes and find coupons before you shop, among other things.

Using a barcode scanner, KitchenAttendant keeps tabs on everything you buy to build shopping lists for next time. It will also let you know if anyone in your family has an allergy to the items on the list, in case you’re really capable of programming Timmy’s peanut allergy into a computer and forgetting about him next time you whip up a batch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

For learning new recipes, the KitchenAttendant goes beyond printed instructions by offering downloadable, step-by-step videos. Novel, it would seem, until you need to re-watch step 11 after your hands are already plastered in shortening and flour. Let’s hope the touchscreen is sensitive enough to pick up touches from noses and elbows.

With all this data at KitchenAttendant’s disposal, it can also cook up some neat graphs and make suggestions. For instance, according to the company’s Web site, if you make a four-pound meatloaf for your family and end up throwing a pound of it away, FoodAttendant will suggest a three-pound meatloaf next time. Try figuring that out without a computer.

If all this talk of the new kitchen appliance has you salivating one, you’ll have to get your data-crunching fix from Microsoft Excel for now. KitchenAttendant’s Web site had no pricing information, and checking availability with ZIP codes all over the country didn’t net a single one where KitchenAttendant was available.