Egg McToaster
A new appliance puts love in your tummy
My kitchen counter is cluttered, but it doesn't matter. I'll be making room for the Egg & Muffin Toaster, whose name expresses its elegant simplicity. Sold for $50 at stores like Bed Bath & Beyond ( walmart.com is the first to carry it online), the appliance does the usual heating of bread (of the sliced, bagel, croissant, or muffin variety) but then adds a revolutionary component. The very same appliance can poach or hard-boil an egg even as it toasts. Pour some water into the circular basin, crack an egg into the accompanying tray, and relax with the morning paper while the Egg & Muffin Toaster prepares your breakfast. In about four minutes, the bread and egg are ready to be assembled into the ultimate start-your-day sandwich. There's even a tray to warm up cooked bacon. Add a piece of cheese to the sandwich for the perfect level of melt. Our strenuous testing involved making 25 sandwiches in a row. They were all delicious. Once you've mastered the muffin-egg-bacon routine, you're ready to move on to more-complex applications, like beating an egg and dumping it into the poaching tray with bits of veggies for a mini omelette-ish thing.
The anticholesterol crowd will not embrace this sleek new kitchen toy (unless they use whole-grain bread and egg substitute, which is possible). A more serious flaw is the fact that the Egg & Muffin can poach only one egg at a time, so even though cooking and cleanup are simple, a morning-sandwich-loving family of four will be frustrated. Kids, you'll just have to learn to get up early.
This story appears in the September 12, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.