Friends in the Kitchen

From Bodum, this lime green Bistro toaster may make mornings bearable. It is also available in red and black and is $50.99 at www.target.com.

Truth to tell, there are a lot of very cute, chubby little rice cookers on the market. But we liked the red of this mini rice cooker from Elite by Maxi-Matic. It also comes in a deep cobalt blue and makes 4 cups of rice. It’s $40 at maxi-matic.com.

It’s a mental journey to go from cheese to a cowbell, but you get there eventually. From the Italian company Alessi, the stainless-steel Cheese Please grater, designed by Lorenza Bozzoli and Gabriele Chiave, is a bit over 6 inches tall and $65 at shop.alessi.com.

Almost 4 inches tall, this cheerful electronic Duck Timer by Eero Aarnio quacks when time is up. Made of thermoplastic resin for Alessi, it is also available in black or white and costs $62 at shop.alessi.com.

Sitting seaside in Italy back in 1990, French designer Philippe Starck sketched a squid and wound up morphing that sketch into this foot-tall Juicy Salif citrus squeezer. He sent his sketch (on a napkin!) to Alberto Alessi, resulting in the now-iconic kitchen “sculpture,” described by its creator as “not meant to squeeze lemons” but “to start conversations.” It is $102 in polished aluminum or white. But if you revere design icons even more, you can buy one from a numbered edition of 299 bronze castings for $1,650. Both from shop.alessi.com.

The Francis! Francis! espresso machine made for Illy coffee comes in a pod version (iperEspresso). Retailer Sur la Table has a program to take some of the evil out of all those landfill-hogging used single-serve capsules. The friendly-looking FrancisFrancis!! X1 is $599.95 at Sur la Table stores.

Okay, it looks like a bowling ball on your kitchen counter, but the Elite by Maxi-Matic air fryer does the job–frying with little oil–2.5 pounds of food per batch. It’s $190 at maxi-matic.com.

Hope springs eternal: That’s the engine behind second marriages, and it’s why I swore that my new kitchen would have nothing on its counters but Richard Sapper’s Todo giant cheese grater. Right–these days I can barely find it out there. Sapper based the design on the idea that one sweep of the chunk of Parmesan cheese down the length of the conical grater would be enough for a single portion. Made of stainless steel and wood, the 18-inch-tall Todo now costs $100 at shop.alessi.com.

I love my Sodastream sparkling-water maker to death. Would I love it more if it were in the shape of a cuddly Penguin? Maybe. The Penguin model is $190 and exclusively at Williams-Sonoma stores (and williams-sonoma.com). It comes with two 20-ounce-capacity glass carafes. My only quibble with this design: I like my larger bottles better.

The clever Hug salt-and-peppers, designed in 2002 by Alberto Mantilla, have it all figured out: White is salt, black is pepper, and the three dispensing holes in each is the character’s face. They’re $32 for the pair at the Museum of Modern Art shop, momastore.org.

The new face of cooking? This proud pair of porcelain lion salt and peppers is on sale for $7.96 at surlatable.com.

Okay, this is as close to a real critter as we want in the kitchen. Ceramic squirrels, which can hang on the wall and are made in a bunch of bright colors at the Mercantile Home studio in Pennsylvania, are $54.95 each at Home Rule, 1807 14th St. NW; 202-797-5544.

One of our favorite gadgets from Chef’n, this pair of mini salt and pepper grinders look friendly and are magnetic so you can keep them nearby for one-handed grinding. The mini set is $15 at Sur la Table stores and surlatable.com. The 1995 originals in the large size are now called Pepperball and Saltball, and refilling has been made easier (though they seem to have lost their friendly bunny face and come only with black handles). They’re $17.99 each at chefn.com.

STEPHANIE SEDGWICK, formerly a recipe editor for the Washington Post’s food section, was always happy to help out people who called in with frantic recipe questions, explaining, “I know what’s it’s like to be alone and afraid in the kitchen.”

I can’t imagine Stephanie being afraid—of anything—but she was right that it’s hard to be alone in the kitchen when the meal, the family, the guests, even the dog, all depend on you.

How much cozier the room would seem if it had “friends” in it. By that I don’t mean people, although that is often nice. I mean friendly-looking things, objects that can do a job but also get credit for sitting around idle, just looking great, or reassuring.

You’ll notice, no doubt, that there’s a playful roundness to many of the items I selected. I chose them for the same reason I chose to buy a Mazda Miata years ago: People might have an attitude toward a speedy Porsche but they always awww-ed their way around the don’t-hurt-me aesthetic of the Miata, as if it were a puppy.

Perhaps my criteria don’t match your own, and you don’t find the humor or the grace or the aesthetic reassurance from the objects shown. That’s okay; now that you have “permission,” you can find your own friends—they’re out there!

—Nancy McKeon