misosouper, a shopping blog

Isn’t that right, Hillary?

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So unabashedly swank: if you were ever to serve brunch to stuffy future in-laws or your elegant boss, this mid-century toast rack salvaged from the London Ritz would be your table’s coup de grace.

In another lifetime, I interviewed for what promised to be an outwardly glamorous but probably plodding and dull position at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. I didn’t get the job, but my affection for the place remains: its location in the wisteria-draped Andrew Carnegie mansion is second only to its walled garden, which serves wine at tables buffeted from the Museum Mile fray.

And oh, the stuff! Cooper-Hewitt’s rooms brim with showpieces that would make Apartment Therapists weep. Its gift-shop approximation of the classic Arco Floor Lamp–cheap, witty, battery-powered–was like me on that interview: totally out of my league, but aspirational nonetheless.

A tiny print of a flaming skull, letterpressed Elizabethan style.

For a time, I was into these skinny jeans that, while making my legs look fantastically long, were $150+. Since I try to avoid trendy *and* spendy, I found an alternative: J Crew’s Matchstick jean, which comes in lots of colors (don’t forget to check out the cords), retains its shape throughout the day, and rings in at a cool $88.

When Mr. Misosouper and I lived in New York, our apartment in Chelsea was catty-corner to the now-defunct Kitchen/Market burrito junket. Every day for three years, I traipsed past this bag in their window, promising myself that tomorrow, I’d stop in to buy it. Not to get all James Bondian on you, but tomorrow never came, for my bag, or for Kitchen/Market and its sister, Bright Food Shop: both restaurants closed in 2007. Here’s hoping for a resurrection.

Think of these lovely drains as incentive to keep your sink from becoming a dish-dumping ground.

Now that my daughter has started preschool, I’m planning ahead for show-and-tell. One of the goals of show-and-tell, of course, is to bring in the coolest thing, the thing that makes all the other kids tug their parents’ shirts and loudly whisper, “Oooh, I want thaaat,” in that long-voweled way kids so sweetly do.

Yeah, they’re brine shrimp; and yeah, they’re gross; but I can guarantee you that when your child (hell, when your significant other) trots into her classroom with a Sea Monkey strapped to her wrist, you’re the parent of the coolest kid in the school.

As you read this, Hurricane Fay bears down on my state’s shores. Our power is probably out, and a tree branch has punctured my windshield. (No one was in the car, thank goodness. Who goes out driving in a hurricane anyway?)

You might worry that we’re subsisting on a meager diet of PB&J and Tang. But no. As a veteran of exactly 873,642 hurricanes, I know that when the going gets wet and windy, the wet and windy grill. And with this griddle, our grill transforms into a skillet, so that we can eat bacon, eggs, and home fries for breakfast before we go outside to retrieve the mailbox that has inevitably landed on our front lawn.

I’ve seen Kiel Mead’s knot-me-tight-and-don’t-let-go rings before, cast in sterling and gold. The beautifully blackened version is more bleak than demure, as if you have a painful, delicious secret that needs remembering.