The International Home and Housewares Show has been a great opportunity to meet inventors and innovators in person. We were excited to meet the team behind a strange yet fascinating product we featured during Coffee Week. The Handpresso is a French invention that lets you have espresso anywhere - whether you're camping out in the mountains, a hotel room or just the office. Check out this one-minute impromptu video of their demonstration, and click through to see more of the gadget and to read our impressions of the espresso itself... More

The Home and Housewares Show here in Chicago is its own kind of runway. Some colors are in, like orange and vanilla. Others colors, including red and lime green, are showing up less than they did last year.

Our favorite color from the show is this limited edition titanium cocotte oven from Staub. This stunner grabbed our attention from a couple rows away. Can you picture Madonna braising away in a pot like this? ... More

We're easily distracted at the Home & Housewares Show. With a celebrity chef here, a funnel cake machine for home cooks over there, every booth woos us.

The Chicago show is a launching pad for new colors, new trends, and over the top ideas (any takers for an LED light that makes the water flowing from the kitchen tap glow, anyone?).

On Day 2 we tried to focus on practical products that solve real kitchen problems. We hunted for truly useful products we could put right to work in our kitchens. Here's three of our favorite finds . . .
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We're heading back to the trade show in a few minutes, but wanted to stop in and share our notes from the first day at this mega trade show.

Day 1 was "The Best of Tongs, The Worst of Tongs." Seriously. We must have tried a dozen tongs yesterday. We've never seen so many variations on tongs. We confess we've never cooked with silicone tip tongs before. Have you?

The big trends we see here are . . . More