5 Weird and Wonderful Food Oddities You Can Buy Online

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dembones via Etsy
Sugar cube skulls from dembones
Do you spend time wandering the interwebs looking for more stuff to stuff into your kitchen? The odder the better? No? Well, we do, and we thought it was time we shared some of our finds with you, because there is some seriously cool (and weird) stuff out there. Useful? Sometimes. Awesome? Always.

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Q & A With Faith H. Willinger: Chef, Author + Patron Saint of the Tostapane

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A few months ago, a friend returned home from Italy with a gift for us. When we first unwrapped it, we were totally befuddled. "What is this,?" we wondered. "Is it a paddle for badminton on Mars? A space shuttle heat shield with a handle? A fan for a robot Geisha?" As it turns out, it was for making toast, Italian-style, and the most treasured kitchen gadget of legendary Florence-based American food and travel writer, chef and tour guide, Faith H. Willinger. So we promptly stuck it on our stove top, cranked the burner up to high and incinerated a piece of bread. Time to get in touch with FHW. To learn more, turn the page.

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Top 5 Kitchen Gadgets on eBay Right Now

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Flickr/Sam Howzit
an eBay yard sale, whatever that is
For guitar amps, gently-used "attitude tees" and vintage poster art, eBay is that ephemeral, endless Target in the sky. Most of us also know by now that there is no better source (save a millionaire foodist's estate sale) for odd and esoteric kitchen gadgets. Whether you're looking for a new addition to your "technemotional" cooking armory or some weird granny cookware, eBay spills forth with dazzling options. Read on for five you might want to place a bid on.


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Sapore dei Mobili: Tiny Furniture You Can Eat

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Sapore dei Mobili
Design in good taste
Milan-based designers Ryosuke Fukusada and Rui Pereira explain their Sapore dei Mobili (Taste of Furniture), a waffle pan that turns out tiny edible furniture, as a "reflection about the velocity of the contemporary furniture industry and how the consumers are unable to digest the huge amount of new products launched every year." Because how better to make design digestible than to make design that's literally digestible?

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The Ruler Knife: or, More Fun With OCD Kitchen Tools

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Neatorama's Neatoshop
Ruler Knife
If the OCD Chef's Cutting Board convinced you that everything in your kitchen needs to have some unit of measurement on it, see the natural evolution of the kitchen tool-as-caliper: Creative Kitchen's 6-inch Ruler Knife has a ruler printed directly on its blade (inches on one side, centimeters on the other) so you can "chop with precision!" You also no longer will have to constantly dig through the junk drawer for the one ruler in the house that hasn't been wrapped in red Play-Doh and repurposed as a light saber just so you can cut actual dough to the right length.

Neatorama is selling the Ruler Knife for $11.95, plus shipping, at its Neatoshop. It's a small price to pay, really, for the priceless satisfaction of making everything as uniform and consistent as possible. Well, cheaper than seeing the therapist, anyway.

Food Gadgets for Hipsters: Bicycle Can Cage

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WalnutStudiolo
Last year Food Gadgets for Hipsters looked at the Bicycle Wine Rack. Its hipster quotient registered high scores, considering its lovingly crafted and carefully tanned leather straps would likely be used to cart around bottles of ironically cheap wine. Yet strap in a more expensive bottle and that score would plummet to levels so low you might as well be shopping for bike accessories at SkyMall, in earnest. These are the laws of hipster economics.

Our readers demanded something more reliably hip. A bicycle gadget so specialized and expensive that even the most costly beverage would still register as ironic. We searched, and found you that device. Presenting the Bicycle Can Cage by WalnutStudiolo, a $64 contraption of handcrafted leather capable of holding nothing more than a single canned beverage. Strap in a can of Pabst and you're unflinching hip. Feeling more like a tall boy? According to the our calculations (expressed cost of gadget/ cost of can), you're still looking extremely ironic.

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Girl Scout Cookie Locator App: Find Cookies, Find Yourself

Categories: Cookies, Gadgets

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Punctuated/Flickr
Girl Scout Cookies
The Girl Scout Cookie season is just about to start, an annual event to which some of us look forward with more anticipation and excitement than Christmas. If you were not lucky enough to have a co-worker waving around Girl Scout Cookie order forms at the office last month, and you're loath to scan the entrance of every grocery store for the telltale green columns of Thin Mints, try, instead, the 21st-century solution to that 20th-century problem: the Cookie Locator App, available as a free download for your iPhone and Android-based device.

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FDA to Investigate Safety of Caffeine Inhaler AeroShot Pure Energy

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T. Nguyen
AeroShot Pure Energy
AeroShot Pure Energy -- a small canister that delivers a "shot" of inhalable, powdered caffeine with just a puff or two -- landed on the market in New York and Massachusetts last month without much scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration. Until now, anyway: According to the Associated Press, the FDA will investigate the product to determine whether the product is safe for consumption.

The AeroShot is intended to provide a quick caffeine delivery system for those who can't be bothered to drink a cup of joe. Each AeroShot is $2.99 and contains about 100 milligrams of caffeine powder, approximately the amount of caffeine in a large cup of coffee. The powder dissolves almost instantly on the tongue when the AeroShot is puffed.

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A Christmas List for George Smiley: 5 Food Gadgets for Secret Agents

Categories: Gadgets

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What to buy for the neighbor you suspect is a secret agent? The question plagues us every year. He's quiet mostly, always watching. He's obsessed with "the Soviets." Also there's that fog that hangs perpetually around his house. So probably not a holiday sweater. Your gift must be something he can use, something that appeals to his worldly sensibilities, something that says, "I know but I won't tell, even if they waterboard me." We've scoured the internet for espionagical kitchen gadgets that do just that, you'll find them listed in the dossier following the jump.

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AeroShot Coffee Inhaler: Snort the Caffeine

Categories: Coffee, Gadgets

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AeroShot
Los Angeles has seen a number of specialty cafes open in the last few years, with great beans and different brewing styles. What if you don't have the time, interest or patience to deal with the process of ordering from a snobby barista then actually drinking your coffee? Carry a few rounds of AeroShot Pure Energy, pellet-sized canisters that allow you to inhale the caffeine and get your fix faster than a double shot of espresso.

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