A Mallet As a Meat Tenderizer?

The cover story to today's Sun-Times food section deals with inexpensive substitutes for fancy kitchen tools that you can find at the hardware store, which is something we've been down with since we started using the kitchen for more than beer-pong and a mechanic's station for bike repair. We typically use paint brushes to marinade roasts and meats, to butter pastries and to clean out the coffee grinder. We also have a mini-propane torch for making creme brulee and meringues and have been known on occasion to use a rubber mallet as a meat tenderizer when our standard one just isn't enough.

Some of the substitutes we find really inventive, if only because we don't have cable and didn't see Alton Brown put together a food dehydrator from a box fan and fiberglass-free furnace filters the first time it ran on Food Network. We wished we thought about using quarry tiles as a pizza stone before we spent money on one at Beverly's Pantry. But a c-clamp as a nutcracker is just too much, especially when a hammer or a pair of pliers can do the trick just as well.