Your dishware thinks you are a LOSER and it is NOT AFRAID to tell you. What’re you gonna do, not eat? Just internalize the insults and finish up your Hamburger Helper like a good rube. (Plates from Vandalized Vintage)

It is, of course, Thursday night – and the first Thursday of the month to boot – so by all rights I should be cooking something orange. But normal rules of engagement only apply in the absence of teh crazy. And teh crazy? It is on like fucking Donkey Kong right now.

Bear with me while I share, because afterward there will be much cuteness to erase the horror of this paragraph from your mind. You see, I have the vanilla crazy, which is mostly under control. But this week, I have the Rocky Road with Whipped Cream and a Cherry on Top crazy, wherein my reproductive organs go on a 4-month hiatus before coming back WITH A VENGEANCE, flooding my body with a metric kiloton of crazy-making hormones that bust right through all my meds.

I HAVE HAD MY PERIOD FOR 13 DAYS. You may think that’s TMI, but if you look deep down inside I think you’ll find that you really wanted to know that. 13 days. Just think about that for a minute, then try to blame me for failing to smack anything down.

I did produce some dinner, but I wasn’t cooking in my kitchen, didn’t have my camera, and don’t have PhotoShop on this computer. Consequently, the picture of my chicken with mushroom-sherry gravy looks not unlike dog food and I am electing not to post it.

Instead, I’m taking this opportunity to start a new feature here: Kitchen Crap. Along with food blogs, I read a lot of design blogs and compulsively tag many a culinary tchotchke that is either painfully functional or painfully cleverly designed but that I can’t fit into my new budget or apartment-size kitchen. But YOU should have these things, and so I will direct you to them. There are no affiliate or kickback schemes going on here; I’m not trying to make a buck. It’s not going to be a regular thing; more like a too-lazy-to-cook-tonight thing, so I thought tonight was as good a time as any for the first installment.

This Forked UP flatware storage tile from Thout Furniture, pictured above left? I covet it with a love that is unholy. The magnetic wall tile accommodates all kinds of flatware. Best cutlery storage device ever, or THE BEST?

These bowls are made from logs. Big. Heavy. Wood. You know what they are: they’re better than bad – they’re good.

Everyone wants a log.

Come ON, get your log.

I have an overwhelming urge to eat cereal out of these logs that is somewhat frightening in its intensity.

If I had a larger kitchen table, lots of money and less rambunctious dogs, I’d get a bunch of them to use as a centerpiece and fill them with found objects, tiny pebbles, small fruits, spare keys, twigs, berries, etc. One would also be great next to the stove as a salt cellar to replace your twee Nigella salt pig. Not that I’m judging.

I know, I know, you’ve seen Mr. and Mrs Jones Juicers before. I don’t care. To me, they are everything a juicer should be.

They’re also kind of an Inferno-esque torture for the good Jonses. Like, maybe during life Mr. Jones was a shitty phlebotomist who needlessly caused many people minor discomfort, and now he’s doomed to an eternity of having citrus juice constantly rubbed all over him, penetrating his every open wound, however minor. I’m willing to entertain the idea that I may be reading too much into that.

Sometimes things in the kitchen don’t always go as smoothly as we’d like. I mean, that never happens to me, but I assume the less talented among us are occasionally overwhelmed when our culinary hubris outstrips our culinary ability.

On those rare occasions we should all take a hint from the perennially stiff upper lip of the British government, who, during WWII, kept the populace peaceful and productive with its “Keep Calm and Carry On” signs, which I have to assume were more successful at assuaging hysteria than the U.S. attempt, “When You Drive Alone, You Drive With Hitler.”

Thanks once again to the Brits, we can have this motto in dish towel form. Let us rejoice that there is no American analogue for this product. (“When You Purchase Foreign Oil, you Give Osama Bin Laden a Hand Job.”)

I love this set of 2 mugs for exactly 3 reasons, no more, no less:

  1. The double-mugedness of it, which gives me somewhere to hold my cookies and even to warm them over a hot beverage, if I so choose.
  2. The color combo of the pear green and deep teal.
  3. The fact that the text (look closely, there’s white text on one of the pears) reads, “A bird found many fruits!” Because what the fuck does that mean, and why is it on my mug.

Ergo, I need this mug. Another version is available depicting children and birds in a tree, reading, “Welcome to the top of the tree. What can you see from there?” Is this a rhetorical question? Is it a fucking Zen koan? These mugs are TOO SUBTLE FOR MY MIND.

Last but not least, I’ve always had a crush on this olive oil dish. As someone who loves olive oil as a food in and of itself, and not just as an additive or cooking fat, I’m in love with the way this little number shows off the gorgeous color of good olive oils with its gradually deepening gradations.

I’m not really into buying single-purpose items for the kitchen because I don’t really have the space to handle them, but I think I’ll be making an exception for this.

Fin.

Future Kitchen Crap posts will focus on one kind of item (I’m working on an exciting collection of cruets as we speak! Gasp!), so if there’s anything you’d like to see, drop me a line. In the meantime, I really do apologize for biffing out on the Smackdown, but eagerly await all your orange concoctions!

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