Every time you turn around, there's a new brightly-colored, cleverly-named kitchen product adorned with google-y eyes and baring a twenty dollar price tag. We've all come across these products, smiled, cooed, and handed over our Visa, only to get them home and dizzily wonder, What the heck was I thinking? The utensil then sits unused, in your junk drawer, until, in a furious bout of spring cleaning three years later, you stumble upon it and have absolutely no idea what it is.

Don't feel bad. We've all done this. It's awful fun to peruse these items at stores, play with them, and make them into little puppets in order to entertain/freak out your other customers (in fact, the latter is one of my favorite pastimes). So in an effort to dissuade you from buying these little gadgets in the future, we've provided some of them here, so you'll know 'em when you see 'em.

Now, for the record, I understand that these products do serve some purpose, however insignificant. And if you happen to own one of these products, more power to you! I am simply suggesting that there are, perhaps, other ways to accomplish the same kitchen tasks that these products purport to execute...

Now, without further ado...

Designboom, a mod blog devoted to the latest and greatest in product design, recently came out with the winners of its 2006 Dining in 2015 contest. The challenge was exactly as it sounds: to design a food-related product that would be useful in 2015 at work, in travel, or at home.

Chefs and designers from Italy and Japan judged the entires and came up with the top three and an honorable mention.

Let's start from the bottom and work up. The honorable mention [ed. note: shown in photo] was an eco-friendly solution to dinner prep: silicone and nylon triangle-shaped buckets that allow the cook to boil three different foods all in one pot, thereby saving energy, time, and water. I totally expect it to be selling out on QVC in no time.

Third place? A creative ceramic salt and pepper shaker that forces you to physically break open the canister to access the spices inside. The goal of the project? There isn't any, really, but we bet it's really, really fun to break open. Save it for a day when you're really pissed off at someone, and then smash away. (But don't get carried away - - then you'll just have a mess of salt, pepper, and white ceramic shards to clean up).

Sell by, best by, and use by are all labels that we commonly see on foods in the grocery store. They are on just about anything that is packaged, from milk and bagged produce to cookies and soda. Is there really a difference between the terms, and if so, what is it?

BusinessWeek actually has some of the answers for us. A "sell by" date is one that indicates to a store how long the product should be offered for sale, although such a product will almost always be good for at least a few days beyond that date. A "best by" date means that the flavor or texture of a food will begin to decline at that point. The "use by" date is the real expiration date. Beyond it, there is no guarantee that the food will be fresh and tasty or that it will retain all of the nutrients that it started out with. The overall quality of the product can begin to decrease and you're probably better of just starting again with a fresh bottle/can/bag.

The best strategy is to buy foods in small batches so you don't have to worry about expiration dates of any sort coming on too quickly, but keep the dates in mind as you shop for reference points, and choose products with further dates if you know you're not going to be consuming everything you buy in a short period of time.

Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet, which is known for their grills and outdoor kitchens, has just introduced a new product that will have pizza lovers pining: an artisan pizza oven. The oven has a 30,000 BTU burner (gas or propane) to get the heat level just right, and a wood-chip drawer so you can add in some of the smoky flavor a wood-burning oven would naturally provide. Under the low, domed roof, the floor of the oven is a professional composite baking stone that will turn out perfect crusts on pizzas (and breads) every time it is used. Unlike smaller stones that are used for baking in regular ovens, according to the manufacturer, this one will not become brittle or crack even after repeated or extended use.

It is made of stainless steel with a double-wall insulated design, so one of the best features of the oven is not just that it will produce pizza that is much better than you could make with a standard kitchen oven, but that it is very safe, despite the high heat that it operates at.

The ovens will be available for purchase next month, with a price tag of $3,900 each. They certainly aren't cheap, but if you really love your pizza, it might just be worth it.

[via Trendir]

Much like the recent battle over what can and can't be called feta cheese, several European countries are trying to restrict what can be called vodka. Finland, Poland and Sweden feel that only spirits distilled from certain grains and potatoes have the right to be called vodka, the Associated Press reported. The countries are opposed to products like Cîroc, distilled from grapes, being called vodka because they fear it will dilute the definition of their traditional versions. Others say it's simply a marketing tactic, designed to limit the number of new entrants into the vodka market.

[Via Fark]

Have you ever looked at a product and thought I could come up with that! or this would be so much better if they had just added (blank)? Now is your chance to have your idea made into a blockbuster. Kraft announced in last week's Wall Street Journal that they are accepting ideas from real people about what products they want to see on the shelves. Generally, product ideas come via market researchers or trend-watching firms, then are made into reality by food scientists (link to bread article) before being taste tested by groups of consumers. In this new campaign, the product starts and ends with consumers.

In all honesty, it sounds like they must be having some creative problems with their product development team, especially because they are particularly interested in ideas that haven been patented and "can be brought to market quickly." Nevertheless, this sounds like a great opportunity for anyone with an innovative idea to get their product across to one of the largest food companies in the world - without the usual hassle and red tape that go along with regular submissions.

There is a set of rules to help protect the company and the rights of the person submitting the idea for new products, packaging, or business processes/systems (all of which are being accepted), so be sure to check them out first.

 

At Luxist, Deidre reported that a new scent called the Spirit of Scotland is to go on sale soon. Following in the footsteps of another unusual scent, the Spirit of Scotland is supposed to smell like malt whisky. While people have sample the scent and given it positive reviews, not everyone feels that it actually smells like whisky. Apparently, it has smoky, peaty notes with floral overtones. Honestly, it seems like you wouldn't want to walk around smelling like whisky all day, so it's probably just as well that the perfume is not an exact match for the spirit. Of course, if you already walk around smelling like whisky and are looking for a way to hide that, this could be the perfect product. 

A Japanese company called VitaCraft has come out with a pan that communicates with the stove top using RFID. Simply place your recipe card under the reader, and the pan will monitor and adjust the heat on the pan according to the recipe. This is a really neat idea, but the problem is that there's simply more to recipes than heat regulation. There are just too many variables to regulate when cooking, which is probably why it's so difficult to make a robot to cook without supervision.

Another potential problem with the RFID pan is that someone could hack it to burn your shrimp. Think about it--just go around the city with a powerful RFID transmitter and burn everyone's meal!