What is this strange, foreign object...

This hasn't made an appearance in our kitchen in many, many years:

Yet it appeared one day, because of my not-so-successful purchase - those not-so-tasty gourmet marshmallows.

Since I couldn't figure out any other way to use up them up, other than to make rocky road ice cream, which I was not prepared to do given that it's still winter and I would have needed to make gallons of the stuff, I gave in and made the classic - rice krispie squares. Of course, because of my adoration for David Lebovitz, I decided to try his White Chocolate Rice Krispies recipe. What confused me was the requirement for a 10 oz or 300g bag of marshmallows. I had marshmallows - but I had no idea how much I had. The weight was nowhere to be found on the bag or on the website. How weird is that? 

So I went out and bought this new toy:

That's not a stock photo, that's really the model that I bought. See the crumbs and smudges on the shiny red surface? Not a professional picture at all. And yes, it is an indulgent purchase considering I have never needed to weigh anything before now. Bakers swear by the precision of a scale, but as OCD as I am, I had never felt the need to take accuracy to this level. 

However, now that I have it in the kitchen, I find I use it fairly often for everyday recipes. For example, it came in handy when I needed 5 oz of goat cheese for goat cheese custards (more on that another time), again when we needed 15 oz of beans for a white bean puree (instead of using canned beans, we soaked a bunch and cooked them, but didn't know how much of it we should use), and again when I needed 1 oz of grated Parmesan for a chicken pot pie recipe. I'm sure we could have winged it had we not had a scale available, but now that it's one of our standard kitchen tools, I feel so much more secure with precision measuring. 

As for those rice krispie squares? I didn't like them. I guess inferior-tasting marshmallows lead to disappointing rice krispies - they weren't buttery enough for my liking, and I was a little over-enthusiastic in mashing the mix into the pan because they came out dense and somewhat hard to chew. Oh well, now I know to leave the rice krispie making to the professionals. Which reminds me, there was a rice krispie maker featured on Foodcrafters recently, I'm going to have to go order some...