This is my kitchen scale. I heart my kitchen scale. You can tell by all the grunge—it gets a lot of use. Everyone should have one.
This particular scale weighs in ounces, grams, fluid ounces, and probably some other excellent units with which I am unfamiliar. It also has a tare feature—my favorite—which allows me to dump 8 ounces of flour into a bowl, hit zero, then add 8 ounces of sugar. Not sure what I’d be making with those proportions, but probably something tasty. You get the idea. I use it for ALL of my baking—everything from bread to cookies to pancakes.
We also use it—and this is important—for measuring things we’re actually about to eat. Most of the time, that’s just breakfast cereal (I find that it’s really hard to eyeball a sensible amount of cereal, particularly since we have a variety of bowl sizes). You’d be surprised how easy it is to accidentally pour yourself a hundred calories more than you really need. The scale makes it much harder to make that “mistake.”
And on days when my pants are a little too tight, I might measure some other things, as well: exactly 2 ounces of dry pasta, or 3 ounces of grilled chicken, or 1 ounce of cheese for that sandwich. Ten years ago, when we were figuring out how to live with heart disease, one of our first projects was to get our weight under control. Lee was a big guy, and I was still nursing a baby, so we both needed to lose some pounds. The scale took a lot of the guesswork out of the process, which in turn alleviated some of the stress that we put on ourselves—we’re both pretty serious Type-A folks. The scale is neutral, but unequivocal: an ounce is an ounce is an ounce. Period.
But here’s the big secret about my kitchen scale: it cuts WAY down on dirty measuring cups! Shhh . . . don’t tell anyone . . .
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