‘Burtonized’ pizza water
I've been told by a reliable source — "Uncle Larry," who ran King Pizza, the place I went as a kid, as relayed by my brother, who spent a lot more time there than I did — that the reason you can't get good New York pizza anywhere other than NY is that the water is all wrong elsewhere.
Brewers have had, for decades or longer, a solution to this problem: If you want to make an IPA like the ones traditionally made at Burton-on-Trent, you burtonize the water by adding mineral salts to give the water the same character.
Someone, therefore, should put together a packet of mineral salts that can be added to distilled water, and thereby reproduce New York City water. This should be done in quantities accurate for NY pizza reproduction.
Misfortune Cookies
Not cruel fortunes. Vague, portentious, threatening fortunes. Eliot's "Fear death by water" would be great. Also "It's not what you think," and "He's lying." Things like that.
American Dim Sum
or American Tapas, if you prefer. Restaurants that serve upscale pub grub in teensy portions at reasonable prices, so that everybody can try a little bit of many different dishes.
I'm sure that such places exist, but I don't think the style of food has been named.
Beer Exchange
Once in a while, I get a craving for a beer I just can't find in my area. For example, the Mort Subite cassis lambic is something I haven't had in forever.
I can order it online, direct from Belgium, at terribly inflated rates. I hope that one day I'll run across it locally, but in many states, alcohol distribution is legally restricted to a tiny handful of politically-connected players.
Many states won't allow formal liquor sales via mail, but few if any are likely to interfere with a single person shipping a gift to another person.
So I can't get my beer; presumably, somebody somewhere else can get it, but can't get something else that they'd like, which I might be able to get. There should be a web site that hooks us up, so that we can exchange beery gifts. A simple ebay-like reputation system would be useful to demonstrate that one is not unilaterally giving beer to people who won't reciprocate, but the overall system could be incredibly simple.
Wasabi Chewing Gum
Wasabi-flavored chewing gum. Not too sweet, but with sinus-clearing, head-rush-inspiring doses of the green stuff. The Japanese probably have it already, but what the heck; I've not seen it.
The Teakettle, Improved
One of the frustrations of making tea, or presspot coffee, is that boiling is rarely the correct temperature of the water. Especially for coffee and green tea, but also for other hot beverages, the water should typically be 20 degrees or more below a temperature that will set your kettle a-whistle.
It would be easy to build in a probe thermometer, which would test the temperature in the middle of the water, and to have it beep when the temperature gets to whatever you set, like a kitchen timer but for temperature.
It might be nice if it had a nice silcone-covered handle, like those fancy oven mitts.
On The Road Coffee Set
In Seattle, we take our coffee seriously, if you didn't know. Unfortunately, not everyone outside of Seattle does. And so: us coffee connoisseurs would like it if someone sold a French Press sized for one drinker, packaged in a break-proof container of some sort, with a teensy coffee grinder that fits inside the pot for compact storage. It would be great if there was a small airtight storage box for coffee beans that also fit into the press.
Because of the plunger, it would make sense if the grinder and the bean storage were each semicircular, with divots for plunger-space between them.
Home Scotch Blending
The surge of interest in single-malt scotch is easy to understand: they are quirkier and more intense than traditional blended scotch, and the range of style is far more broad than most blendeds. Single-barrel cask-strength scotches are even more intense and interesting than other single-malts, but there is far less consistency.
That said, there's something to be said for the blended: they are far less one-note than many single-malts (my friend Stu is wont to complain about the single-flavor problem with single-malts), and uniformity is far more achievable than single-cask scotches.
Why don't people blend scotches at home? A couple of particularly delicious single-malts (Lagavulin 16-year, Highland Park 18-year, Balvenie Portwood 21-year, Talisker 10, Bowmore Darkest, Springbank 10, and Glenlivet 12, for example) can be mixed together to achieve interesting and sometimes quite tasty results. (I've conducted a little bit of experimentation to verify this.)
One could mix by the glass, in a graduated cylinder of some sort so as to be able to record proportions for note-taking and accurate reproduction. This might also be a market for drink-mixing robots, so as to guarantee the consistency of the house blend. (Like homebrewers, perhaps some home-blenders will print up their own labels and give them to friends to commemorate special occasions.)
It would be an expensive hobby, sure, but hardly on par with owning a yacht.
Thai Fast Food
When I lived in Baltimore, one of my favorite restaurants was Thairish (pronounced like 'Thai' and 'Irish' elided into a single word --- the owner is Thai, and his wife is Irish, as I understand it). Thairish's formula was simple: they had a vegetable mixture. They had shrimp, chicken, and tofu. You could get the vegetables and one of the protein sources with your choice of six or so sauces — panang, masaman, and others — over rice. (They also had Pad Thai and a yummy Tom Kah Gai, and all right spring rolls, but the curries were the heart of the menu.)
I've always thought that this would be an excellent basis for a chain fast-food restaurant. The only problem is that there's really nothing you can eat one-handed while driving. The cheater's solution would be to make it the sort of fast food where sitting down is mandatory, situate it in shopping malls, and be done. But could you make a sort of cone out of brown rice, and quickly fry it so that it behaves something like a tortilla? You could certainly offer bowls for people who don't want the extra calories, or who want a more traditional experience, but by competing with drive-thru fast-food you open up whole new markets.
There might still be somewhere in Middle America where Thai food is too exotic, or too spicy. Thairish's mild sauces are lovely and wonderful, but you could also use the spice in a marketing campaign, convincing America's teens to out-macho each other with the spicy dishes...
Plastic Wrap as Food Safety Indicator
I wonder if the byproducts of decaying food emit specific, easily identifiable chemical signatures.
If so, perhaps it would be possible to create plastic wrap that changes colors when that the food starts to go bad, perhaps even going through a "use this soon" color before proceeding to the "don't eat this" color.
This would be useful in those disposable Gladware or equivalent disposable plastic containers, too.
It could make cleaning out the refrigerator a color-coded experience.