I gave away my standard candy thermometer last year because I couldn’t manage to use it without inevitably burning myself. (Tilting the pan to get a decent reading requires coordination and I’m not blessed in that realm.) Well, lately I find myself in the throes next-book research: yogurt and cheesemaking, tasks which ask you to keep good measure of temperatures, and rightly so; the bacteria in question prefer you to be precise.

This hip trick, born of necessity, kept my fingertips out of the steaming milk and my trusty meat thermometer in a place where it could do its best work. What problems can’t a clothespin solve?!