I buy my flour in bulk from King Arthur Flour, which means I get a new catalog in the mail every month. It never ceases to amaze me how many one-off gadgets and appliances are sold by a company that ostensibly caters to series bakers.

The most recent example of flagrant pointless was the peanut butter and jelly spreader. It has a spreader on each end so you can avoid contaminating your peanut butter with jelly and vice versa. I personally prefer to use a knife in the PB and a spoon in the J, but that’s just me. I’d watch out if you’re using a runny jam, lest you find your fingers gunked up by sweet stuff when you turn it over to scoop your nut butter.

Then there’s the S’mores maker, which unfortunately did not come from King Arthur Flour. Back in my day — I can’t believe I just wrote that — we used a plate if we wanted to microwave up some s’mores. I’m guessing moms prefer washing a plate to scrubbing the defibrillator hands of an anthropomorphized…something.

Who buys these things, anyway?

These make me happy. They’re yummy. I’d even go so far as to say they’re “nummy,” except I’m just not into babyspeak. Now, I’m in a pretty good mood, but browsing all of the neat Marimekko stuff at Finn Style just puts me in a BETTER mood. I’m positively beaming.

If you’re not familiar with Marimekko, it’s a Finnish textile company best known for its bold patterns and playful designs. It was introduced to the American audience in the 1950s, but the popularity of the patterns surged after a 1960s Sports Illustrated cover featuring First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in a Marimekko cotton dress. Those patterns are now back in vogue and all over all sorts of things, from kitchenware to clothing. You can even buy the fabric on its own and make your own original designs!

It’s a busy day here at La Casa Del Beard, which means all I have time for is a quickie post. Here are four ubercool kitchen accessories from Art Effect:

They’re all wonderful colorful and inexpensive enough to buy for a relative or friend who’s feeling a little down. What could be more cheering than robot plates, a gnome bowl, nonna graters, and vintage-style cake tins? Perhaps robot plates, a gnome bowl, a nonna grater, and one vintage-style cake tin all wrapped up in pretty paper with a sparkly bow on top!

It’s been on heck of a day…I won’t go into details, but a certain someone from my past likes to resurface every now and again to leave insulting comments on my online journal or elsewhere. My plan to post before leaving the house for the day were curtailed when I discovered his latest escapades. Let’s just say it’s a little freaky when you discover that someone you haven’t thought of in years is still thinking about you. Tres creepy!

When I finally did get home, I decided to calm my frazzled nerves with a little retail therapy, and by little I mean very little. If we’re really going to tear the vinyl siding off of our house and paint the whole thing, we need to save our pennies. Here’s what I bought:

Ahhhhh. There’s nothing like a little civility in the form of cloth napkins, tablecloths, lotions, and a nice snack to make one feel grounded again.

There’s a certain category of things for the home that I like to call BK, or “before kids.” Tasteful nudes are one thing — I grew up in a very cultural knowledgeable family with plenty of boobs and wangs on the walls. Still, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t red in the face when my grandfather used the word pubis while sagely pointed out artistic elements in paintings! I interned with a woman whose entire house was a repository for vintage XXX pinups…I always rather wondered what her 13-year-old son thought of them.

I imagine that most people who have things like collections of erotica and Madonna’s Sex book and love dice probably put them away when their kiddies get old enough to read and start asking questions like “What does whore mean?” Or they just don’t reproduce, which is cool, too. Viva Le choix!

The cups, mugs, and tableware Trixie Delicious creates run the gamut from too coole to relatively tame to OMG QUICK PUT IT AWAY BEFORE MY GRANDMA GETS HERE. Unless, that is, your grandma happens to be my grandma, because my gram has quite the dirty mind. There’s something about the dichotomy that tickles me…the first thing you see is this flowery auntiesque-looking plate, then your brain notices it has the word arse splashed playfully across it.

These are some of the tamer specimens. Racier, NSFWish plates can be seen under the jump!

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My grandmother on my mother’s side has a special tea cup she uses. The rest of us use Russian tea glasses while she drinks her blend from a dainty bone china cup and saucer covered in colorful flowers. It’s really a rather lovely thing to see on the table in the cold winter months because it’s so evocative of springtime.

Were I to choose a special cup of my very own, it would probably be a coffee cup and I’d more than likely pick the Chirp cup from Lenox. What can I say? I’m a total sucker for bluebirds…too bad I have a little trouble justifying the $25 price tag.

For now I’ll have to settle for my oddly-balanced yet beloved jade glass cup and saucer I bought at a Cracker Barrel store ages and ages ago. Do you have a special cup or mug or bowl or plate?

There is but a single quatro of napkin rings in the whole of my house. They’re pewter, and I found them long ago while poking through The Beard’s things. I was mystified…why did The Beard have a set of fancy napkin rings embellished with a single engraved H? They were obviously old–the heavy cardboard box in which they were stored was too nice to be new.

All mysteries aside, I thought that lovely pewter napkin rings really ought to be in the general circulation, so I confiscated them and bought a mess of ecologically responsible cloth napkins.

Who’d have thought mannerly cleanliness could be so much fun? I like sending The Beard to work with a packed lunch complete with a pretty yellow napkin tucked into a napkin ring. He’s told me that his coworkers think it’s awesome, and there are few things I like more than impressing people from afar.

My favorite rings are the porcelain Lenox rings, but that may be because I already have a pewter set. Unfortunately, the rings I have will have to do for a bit…at least until I get some new napkins and start entertaining again. I’ve been too busy lately to even think about rolling a napkin into a napkin ring.

Everyone has that short list of items they’d take with them to that hypothetical desert island that comes up now and again in conversation. Much of the time, those things special to us wouldn’t be of much use to us on that island (what good is a Kitchenaid mixer without electricity?) but we’d haul them along with us anyway. Human being are kind of like magpies that way, and more power to us. I think that our ability to imbue inanimate objects with emotional value is fascinating.

Here’s my list, which I put together just now. I didn’t let myself think too much about my choices because I wanted to see where my impulses would take me.

1. I try to keep an unending supply of petit fours in my pantry. Sometimes I buy ‘em, and sometimes I make ‘em from scratch. You don’t want to run into me on the street when I’ve run out. Little cakes…they are my crack.

2. My collection of Russian khokhloma kitchenware is important to me because it represents a connection to my heritage. Well, part of my heritage seeing as that I’m what one might not-so-politely call a mutt. In more courteous conversation I hail from “mixed ancestry.”

3. I always admired my grandparents’ collection of masks from different parts of the world, and now I have all sorts of masks of my own. Why do I like creepy faces hanging inside my house but hate the creepy faces hanging outside of other people’s houses? I’m going to guess it’s because mine are culturally relevant. I do worry that they’re going to scare the hell out of my kids someday!

4. My red Oreck upright rocks my socks — it was a hand-me-down from my grandparents, and thank goodness for that. Vacuums are way more expensive than I assumed they’d be back before I ever had a floor of my own to keep clean.

5. As annoying and yucky and mean as they can be, I adore my my quatro of cats. Did you think I was going to say “the litter box?” Having living beings around is, in some way, invigorating, if only because I find myself chasing them around the house with the spritz bottle.

I guess at my core I am a crazy, cake-eating cat-lady neat-freak who has a weakness for other cultures. Now tell me, what are the five things that you wouldn’t want to live without? And what does your list say about you?

Amsterdam based designer Monique Goossens creates playful, homey art pieces that are delightful in their unexpectedness.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find out much about Ms. Goossens. Her web site is nothing more than a placeholder for what I imagine will be some wonderful content. For now, I’ve placed some photos of her lovely stuff below the cut.

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Renovating and redecorating — even when the change is a minor one — always makes me want to clean up. A new, intensely white stove just isn’t going to look right in a kitchen that’s a bit dingy with assorted life crud. It doesn’t matter if the replacement item is a sink, toilet, light fixture, or a new piece of furniture, I want to welcome it in with all of the fanfare it deserves. So what if I have to clean all over again when the installers are finished because they’ve left mud and sawdust everywhere?

The thing I really like about pulling things out from under cabinets and moving furniture around is that I’m bound to find something interesting or unexpected. Back in the old apartment in some random June, The Beard and I were rearranging our shared office. To our amazement, we found an unopened Christmas card containing three hundred dollars in cash.

I haven’t uncovered a similar windfall yet, though I am currently doing my best to clear my kitchen of all signs of human habitation. There will be plumbers and contractors tromping through today, and goodness forbid they see any signs that someone, say, cooks and eats in that room. Look, I’m the same person who will clean the entire house twice over because a friend is dropping in after work for a glass of wine. We can’t change who we are.

Anyone, the one thing I did find is the silly little pie bird that my mother-in-law bought me for my birthday last year. Fortuitously, it came with a matching pie plate…this was lucky because the cats’ dish is rather in need of a wash. For the time being, my feline companions will be dining out of a Pfaltzgraff dish.

I haven’t yet used my pie pan and bird to make an actual pie because I hate making pie crust. Pie birds, in case you’re wondering, are steam vents that keep wet fillings from bubbling over into the oven,where they make a great big smoky stink. I’ve been baking since I was knee high to a merry grasshopper (it’s a wonder that The Beard doesn’t weigh 400 pounds) but I cannot for the life of me make a pie crust that turns out tender. My crusts are, frankly, horrid, so I typically buy them, and then I still can’t use the pan because all of the roll out crusts contain lard and we’re vegetarians!

Where was I going with all of this? All I wanted to say when I started was that pie pans and pie birds make great gifts, even for those of us whose pies won’t be winning blue ribbons any time soon. An extra deep dish comes in handy now and again — your cats will thank you — and as for the bird…well, it can sit up on the windowsill over the new sink looking cute and inspiring conversation. After all, how many people in your life have ever seen a pie bird?