Serving

Ever try to balance food on a flimsy paper plate while standing around at a party? You wind up dropping your food, dripping on yourself, or concentrating way too hard on eating your little meatballs.

Designer Alissia Melka-Teichroew wanted to be able to eat and enjoy herself at the same time, so she did something about it. She set out to create a pr-folded plate made from a sturdy material. Ultimately, she determined that the plates could be made flat from ceramic, then placed over molds.

These dishes are not cheap; they'll run you $110 for a set of three plates … Read more

You know the problem: you pack your lunch, but by the time you go to eat it, your banana is bruised and yukky. That's why you need the Banana Guard--a "unique, patented device" that is "specially designed to fit the vast majority of bananas."

Yes, this product begs to be poked fun of, but if you frequently feed children, you may actually find it useful. Kids--at least my kids--often reject food based purely on aesthetics, and many a bruised banana has been deemed unworthy of my children's sensitive palates. The Banana Guard is … Read more

Remember back when you started college, and you dropped about $2K on a Mac LCII with 2MB of RAM? But even more exciting than the early versions of Word Perfect was using a floppy disk to install Tetris on the machine. My personal favorite was Rude Tetris, a version of the game that made fun of every move made. I remember playing a lot of Tetris freshman year; I used to see those little shapes falling when I closed my eyes at night.

The fantastic Tetrish serving dishes celebrate the glory days of my youth. Or, at least, look totally … Read more

Every family seems to have a special way of slicing sandwiches for kids' lunches. Sometimes, it involves removing crusts. Other times it's a question of cutting sandwiches into "fingers." The Critter Cutters offer a way to pack your kid's lunch with extraspecial sandwiches. The cutters cut animal shapes in sandwiches: a butterfly, a dog, elephants, and dolphins. You're not just cutting a shape out of the center of a sandwich, either. The shapes take up a full sandwich, while still creating a sliced sandwich that is easier for little hands to pick up. The cutters … Read more

Whenever I bake a pie, my husband threatens to pull out a protractor to make sure we get even slices. The Progressive International Collapsible Pie Cutter makes it possible to achieve perfect slices without having to go to all that trouble. You can add or remove dividers to the pie cutter so that when you place it on top of the pie and push down, you can get two, four, six, or eight even slices. With a little planning, you can even reconfigure the slicer so that you get uneven slices if, for instance, one guest wants just a smidgen … Read more

Certain desserts call for a sifting of a little something over them: powdered sugar on brownies, or spices on custard, for example. But I don't really want to get out my sifter or, more often after making dessert, clean it out, just to make sure that dessert looks special. The Powdered Sugar Sifter Spoon offers an easier option, letting you tap just a little sugar or spice out over a dish, without having to deal with a big sifter.

The Powdered Sugar Sifter is stainless steel, with a design not so different from the typical spoon. The handle is … Read more

Twirling spaghetti around a fork is a skill that can require a little practice, but you can speed up the process with the Twirling Spaghetti Fork, which costs around $10. Slide it into a pile of spaghetti and turn it on: the Twirling Spaghetti Fork is motorized and will wind your pasta around the tines of the fork. It requires two AAA batteries (which are not included) to operate. They seem to last for quite a while, considering that you really should turn off the fork in between bites. Leaving it running could make getting the spaghetti back off the … Read more

It may be a little early, but I'm already keeping my eyes open for the first plants shooting up in my garden this spring. I'm ready for warmer weather and that fresh green color that seems to take over the whole yard. The Salad Plant Salad Servers may be the closest I come for the next few months, however. They're certainly the right shade of green and the handles look like those first little leaves that poke up. The salad serving set was designed by Martin Blum and Dan Black to mimic the early shoots of spring. … Read more

No matter what you've got on the carving board, it always seems to slide around. You can wind up awkwardly trying to pin a roast in place with one hand while carving off slices with the other. The Gripper Carving Board can make the project easier: it's designed to hold food in place as you slice. A removable metal ring sits in a groove built in to the center of the cutting board. The ring has four points that sink into your food, anchoring it into place. It works well with meat and poultry, but the points will … Read more