Are you still scooping, dipping, and sifting?!? Discover the not-so-secret tool that European home cooks and bakers discovered long ago: an electronic scale. Cooking and baking are about both art and science. Good science starts with precise measurement. Also super-useful for dieters, diabetics, and nutrition professionals/students -- portion control is actually made fun and easy.

When I got serious about baking, it didn't take long to see that the old cups/ounces measurements just weren't going to cut it. I have a large cookbook collection, and the pages dedicated to the various methods of trying to get an accurate amount of flour into a recipe were ridiculous. Scooping, dipping, sifting, leveling. Good grief. I have a few books from the UK, France and Germany, and they contain none of this nonsense -- they simply list all quantities in grams and kilograms. Easy! And water? Just as easy: one liter of water weighs one kilogram -- you gotta love the metric system! I've bought a few scales and thermometers and lots of timers of the years, and these are, hands down, the best, and they're really great deals to boot.

And for recipes that don't list weights? No problem... I just convert them as I go along... I scoop a cup of whatever into a bowl on the scale, then mark down the weight right there in the cookbook, so next time I use that recipe I'm ready to go using the scale and no more measuring cups!

Reasons why every home kitchen should have a good electronic scale, portable timer and thermometer:

Accuracy: make cooking and baking results more predictable and reliable. Now you can use weights to measure ingredients. This is MUCH faster and more reliable than relying on a bunch of teaspoons, tablespoons, and the various cups and fractions of measuring cups.
Time-saving: no more sifting! Is there anything more tedious (and messy) than sifting flour and other ingredients?!? I never sift now (well, maybe for a really delicate cake, but that's another story). Sifting is usually recommended simply to try and get some semblance of accuracy in the dry ingredients (flour mostly) measurements. With a scale, I now just dump all the dry ingredients in the mixing bowl and use a whisk to mix and fluff them and to make sure there are no lumps. Accurate AND easy.
Great for cooking AND dieting. A recipe says "2 pounds -- about so-many quantity of medium-sized potatoes". Forget trying to guess what "medium" means. Just dump them onto the scale. Also great for dieting: no more guesstimating "portion sizes" by using the usual "fist size", or "deck of cards". How large is that burger or chicken breast and how many calories does it contain? Now you'll know. When I first got my digital scale I had it on the counter for weeks weighing everything just out of curiosity (and it really helped when I got serious about losing weight and getting in shape). The model Nutrition Scale below is also very popular with hospitals and university nutrition science departments, so I can heartily recommend it to home users too!
Great Gifts: Strangely enough, I've seen people spend over $3000 on a stove and $2000 on a fridge, but then still fumble around with cups and sifting and so inconsistencies in baking and cooking. A good digital scale can make an affordable gift that people will find themselves using over and over again, saying "why didn't I buy one of these years ago?!?"