Oven Thermometer

Unless you're a professional chef, you're oven is probably not properly calibrated. Rather than spend a lot of money to get that checked, you can spend $10 and get an oven thermometer. This post is brought to you by the turkey debacle from Thanksgiving, 2008, when we couldn't figure out why the turkey still wasn't finished cooking. I didn't have an oven thermometer at that time. Turns out, when I was living in Irvine, the oven in my condo ran about 50 degrees cool, which meant that if I wanted it at 350F, I'd have to set it to 400F. My oven thermometer helped me figure this out. Mine just hangs on the rack, and I can check it when I'm using the oven and adjust accordingly. Very useful.