I love a shiny new kitchen object as much as the next cook, and at times my kitchen has resembled a kitchen specialty store. But if you have a small kitchen, counter space and cabinet storage are at a premium.
Here are some of my all-time favourite gadgets to make your cooking life better.
Cheyenne Cohen/Katie Workman via AP
I’m skipping the bigger appliances like slow cookers and air fryers. I’m also skipping knives, cutting boards, pots and pans, measuring cups and the like, because you pretty much know you need those.
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This is about great gadgets, both low- and high-tech, that deserve a spot in your kitchen because they work hard and smart.
Perfect peeler
I use a peeler pretty much every day for something. Potatoes, carrots, apples, winter squash, etc. I am a fan of Kuhn Rikon peelers, which are lightweight and easy to use on peels thick and thin. OXO also makes an assortment with different blades, shapes and widths.
6:15 Foodie Tuesday: Get to Know Your Cheeky Neighbour
Foodie Tuesday: Get to Know Your Cheeky Neighbour
Pepper mill
Nothing is more important in the kitchen than salt and pepper, and freshly ground pepper is much better than pre-ground. The Peppermate Traditional Pepper Mill is sleek and contemporary looking, made of ceramic with a side crank. It has a removable, clear bottom cup under the grinder to catch the pepper, and an adjustable grinding size, from very fine (for most things) to very coarse (for things like steak au poivre). For a more classic look, Peugeot makes high-quality mills.
Mandoline
It’s hard to get perfectly thin slices for most of us home cooks, even with a good knife. But with a mandoline, you can get even slices of all sorts of vegetables and other ingredients. One example is the OXO Good Grips Hand-Held version, which comes with settings for three different thicknesses, and a handle so you can slice safely and quickly into a bowl or over a plate.
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Food processor
I use no appliance more than this one. I use it for pureeing, chopping, slicing and shredding. Cuisinart has long been my go-to brand; I grew up with one and now own half a dozen. Other companies, like KitchenAid and Breville, also make good food processors. Sizes range from quite large (14- or 16-cup bowls) to mini (about two cups). I recommend one little one, for things like mincing garlic or making pesto, and one large, for everything else.
One of those products where the brand name has become synonymous with the thing itself, even though other manufacturers make similar items. This is basically a small, handheld grater. The most classic one is long and narrow, with lots of fine blades that turn lemon zest and hard grating cheeses and chocolate into fluffy mounds of delicate tiny shreds. You can also get versions that grate food into larger strands.
Instant-read thermometer
There are many versions on the market, from digital to analog to Bluetooth to infrared. When you want to make sure that you are not overcooking a roast beef, or that your bread is cooked through, an instant-read thermometer is indispensable. (You’ll justify the cost quickly when you consider how much you spent on that holiday filet!) In the most user-friendly digital arena, Thermapen instant thermometers are fast and precise with a wide temperature range.
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Immersion blender
I love my blender and food processor, but if you’ve ever tried to transfer a pot of hot, chunky soup to a blender then you understand why an immersion blender is such an asset. Instead of pouring, just place the immersion blender right into the pot. You can even stick the wand into a can of whole tomatoes and puree them right there. There are loads of good ones on the market, from companies like Breville, All-Clad, Braun and Philips.
4:15 Heart-healthy soup with KITCHEN by Brad Smoliak
Heart-healthy soup with KITCHEN by Brad Smoliak
Wine opener
If you’re not a wine drinker, then obviously this isn’t a go-to gadget, but if you are, investing in a nice one makes opening a bottle a real pleasure. Williams Sonoma makes a great assortment, including classic winged corkscrews and easy-to-use lever corkscrews. Rabbit is another reliable name in the wine-opener world, and you might splurge on a Pro Electric Corkscrew with Infrared Thermometer for the true oenophile in your life.
Sous vide
If you’ve been curious about sous vide (and many people are), then now is a good time to try this latest-technology gadget; there are lots of options out there at pretty reasonable prices. Sous vide is a cooking method that entails putting food in a vacuum-sealed bag and cooking it in water at a controlled temperature. It’s basically impossible to overcook it. The Joule Sous Vide is small compared to other sous vide appliances, but powerful, as well as sleek and attractive enough to leave out. It works with phone apps as well for the ultimate in modern cooking.
Want to Outperform 88% of Professional Fund Managers? Buy This 1 Investment and Hold It Forever. – Yahoo Finance
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3 hours ago
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April 19, 2024
By
You might not think it’s possible to outperform the average Wall Street professional with just a single investment. Fund managers are highly educated and steeped in market data. They get paid a lot of money to make smart investments.
But the truth is, most of them may not be worth the money. With the right steps, individual investors can outperform the majority of active large-cap mutual fund managers over the long run. You don’t need a doctorate or MBA, and you certainly don’t need to follow the everyday goings-on in the stock market. You just need to buy a single investment and hold it forever.
That’s because 88% of active large-cap fund managers have underperformed the S&P 500 index over the last 15 years thru Dec. 31, 2023, according to S&P Global’s most recent SPIVA (S&P Indices Versus Active) scorecard. So if you buy a simple S&P 500 index fund like the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF(NYSEMKT: VOO), chances are that your investment will outperform the average active mutual fund in the long run.
Why is it so hard for fund managers to outperform the S&P 500?
It’s a good bet that the average fund manager is hardworking and well-trained. But there are at least two big factors working against active fund managers.
The first is that institutional investors make up roughly 80% of all trading in the U.S. stock market — far higher than it was years ago when retail investors dominated the market. That means a professional investor is mostly trading shares with another manager who is also very knowledgeable, making it much harder to gain an edge and outperform the benchmark index.
The more basic problem, though, is that fund managers don’t just need to outperform their benchmark index. They need to beat the index by a wide enough margin to justify the fees they charge. And that reduces the odds that any given large-cap fund manager will be able to outperform an S&P 500 index fund by a significant amount.
The SPIVA scorecard found that just 40% of large-cap fund managers outperformed the S&P 500 in 2023 once you factor in fees. So if the odds of outperforming fall to 40-60 for a single year, you can see how the odds of beating the index consistently over the long run could go way down.
What Warren Buffett recommends over any other single investment
Warren Buffett is one of the smartest investors around, and he can’t think of a single better investment than an S&P 500 index fund. He recommends it even above his own company, Berkshire Hathaway.
In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Buffett shared a rough calculation that the search for superior investment advice had cost investors, in aggregate, $100 billion over the previous decade relative to investing in a simple index fund.
Even Berkshire Hathaway holds two small positions in S&P 500 index funds. You’ll find shares of the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust(NYSEMKT: SPY) in Berkshire’s quarterly disclosures. Both are great options for index investors, offering low expense ratios and low tracking errors (a measure of how closely an ETF price follows the underlying index). There are plenty of other solid index funds you could buy, but either of the above is an excellent option as a starting point.
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John Ivison: The blowback to Trudeau's investment tax hike could be bigger than he thinks – National Post
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April 19, 2024
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The numbers from the Department of Finance suggest they have struck taxation gold. But they’ve been wrong before
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Published Apr 19, 2024 • Last updated 8 hours ago • 5 minute read
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“99.87 per cent of Canadians will not pay a cent more,” the prime minister said this week, in reference to the budget announcement that his government will raise the inclusion rate on capital gains tax in June.
The move will be limited to 40,000 wealthy taxpayers. “We’re going to make them pay a little bit more,” Justin Trudeau said.
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But it’s hard to see how that number can be true when the budget document also says 307,000 corporations will also be caught in the dragnet that raises the inclusion rate on capital gains to 66 per cent from 50 per cent.
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Many of those corporations are holding companies set up by professionals and small-business owners who are relying on their portfolios for their retirement.
The budget offers the example of the nurse earning $70,000 who faces a combined federal-provincial marginal rate of 29.7 per cent on his or her income. “In comparison, a wealthy individual in Ontario with $1 million in income would face a marginal rate of 26.86 per cent on their capital gain,” it says.
Policy wonks argue that the change improves the efficiency and equity of the tax system, meaning capital gains are now taxed at a similar level to dividends, interest and paid income. The Department of Finance is an enthusiastic supporter of this view, which should have set alarm bells ringing on the political side.
That’s not to say it’s not a valid argument. But against it you could put forward the counterpoint that capital gains tax is a form of double taxation, the income having already been taxed at the individual and corporate level, which explains why the inclusion rate is not 100 per cent.
The prospect of capital gains is an incentive to invest particularly for people who, unlike wage earners, usually do not have pensions or other employment benefits.
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That was recognized by Bill Morneau, Trudeau’s former finance minister, who said increasing the capital gains rate was proposed when he was in politics but he resisted the proposal.
Morneau criticized the new tax hike as “a disincentive for investment … I don’t think there’s any way to sugar-coat it.”
Regardless of the high-minded policy explanations that are advanced about neutrality in the tax system, it is clear that the impetus for the tax increase was the need to raise revenues by a government with a spending addiction, and to engage in wedge politics for one with a popularity problem.
The most pressing question right now is: how many people are affected — or, just as importantly, think they might be affected?
One recent Leger poll said 78 per cent of Canadians would support a new tax on people with wealth over $10 million.
But what about those regular folks who stand to make a once-in-a-lifetime windfall by selling the family cottage? We will need to wait a few weeks before it becomes clear how many people feel they might be affected.
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The numbers supplied to Trudeau by the Department of Finance suggest they have struck taxation gold: plucking the largest amount of feathers ($21.9 billion in new revenues over five years) with the least amount of hissing (impacting just 0.13 per cent of taxpayers).
The worry for Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is that Finance has been wrong before.
Political veterans recall former Conservative finance minister Jim Flaherty’s volte face in 2007, when he was forced to drop a proposal to cancel the ability of Canadian companies to deduct the interest costs on money they borrowed to expand abroad.
“Tax officials vastly underestimated the number of taxpayers affected when it came to corporations,” said one person who was there, pointing out that such miscalculations tend to happen when Finance has been pushing a particular policy for years.
Trudeau’s government has some experience of this phenomenon, having been obliged to reverse itself after introducing a range of measures in 2017, aimed at dissuading professionals from incorporating in order to pay less tax. It was a defensible public policy objective but the blowback from small-business owners and professionals who felt they were unfairly being labelled tax cheats precipitated an ignoble retreat.
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Speaking after the budget was delivered, Freeland was unperturbed about the prospect of blowback. “No one likes to pay more tax, even — or perhaps more particularly — those who can afford it the most,” she said.
She’d best hope such sanguinity is justified: failure to raise the promised sums will blow a hole in her budget and cut loose her fiscal anchors of declining deficits and a tumbling debt-to-GDP ratio.
That probably won’t be apparent for a year or so: the government projected that $6.9 billion in capital gains revenue will be recorded this fiscal year, largely because the implementation date has been delayed until the end of June. We are likely to see a flood of transactions before then, so that investors can sell before the inclusion rate goes up.
After that, you can imagine asset sales will be minimized, particularly if the Conservatives promise to lower the rate again (though on that front, it was noticeable that during question period this week, not one Conservative raised the new $21 billion tax hike).
The calculated nature of the timing is in line with the surreptitious nature of the narrative: presenting a blatant revenue grab as a principled fight for “fairness.” The move has the added attraction of inflicting pain on the highest earners, a desirable end in itself for an ultra-progressive government that views wealth creation as a wrong that should be punished.
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Trudeau’s biggest problem is that not many voters still associate him with principles, particularly after he sold out his own climate policy with the home heating oil exemption.
The tax hike smacks of a shift inspired by polling that indicates that Canadians prefer that any new taxes only affect the people richer than them.
Success or failure may depend on the number of unaffected Canadians being close to the 99.87-per-cent number supplied by the Finance Department.
History suggests that may be a shaky foundation on which to build a budget.
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