Your culinary presentation skills might be at Iron Chef levels of awesome, but your cookbook? That still looks like a hot mess. Let’s face it, it just doesn’t fit in with the rest of your mise en place. Dinner party after dinner party, your digital sous chef gets dripped on and its pages are left sauce-stained no matter what you do to keep it food-free. But the latest in kitchen “wearables” makes it easier than ever (and cleaner! and with less clutter!) to follow your fave crowd-pleasing recipes step by step. Roll up your sleeves: These temporary tattoos double as recipes.
Dreamed up by the Italian design duo I Tradizionali, the temporary tattoos are designed to make the cooking experience more fluid and more fun. You know the drill: Choose the recipe you want to make that night, press it on to a wetted part of your arm and peel it off to see the instructions drawn out in whimsically illustrated steps. Now instead of lunging away from the counter to consult your recipe, you just glance right at your forearm as you chop, chop, chop.
The tats come in collections of themed packages that each contain four different recipes for rustic appetizers + main courses like stuffed dates or spaghetti with sun-dried tomatoes and anchovies. Since each tattoo is about the size of an iPhone, we imagine the recipes can’t get too elaborate (leave the kitchen gadgets out of the picture!). And that’s kind of the point. The ink promotes back-to-basics cooking — that means ingredients should be bought at their freshest and minimally messed with. Plus, less fuss = less potential for an epic fail an hour before dinnertime.
We were sold on the pitch from the start — streamline your cooking process AND look cool doing it — and we imagine that budding chefs, avid home cooks and culinary adventurers alike will be too. If you’re ready to dig in, you can back the project on the Italian crowdfunding site Eppela, where a donation of about $13 can get you a pack of temporary tattoos printed in either Italian or English. We hope that’s just the beginning of a long line of products: maybe a monthly subscription service for hardcore hosts? Or even a series of measurement conversion knuckle tats? They might even help outside the kitchen… slap ‘em on before you go grocery shopping for a hands-free list of every ingredient you need.
Would you cook using these temporary tattoo recipes? What kitchen innovations have left you floored? Tell us in the comments below.
