"Brief jerky" reason enough to wade through Etsy

Raise your hand if you've tried and failed to navigate the online crafts bazaar Etsy.com. Put your hand down if you're fine with that and can go regular-shopping. Put your hand down if you have ADD. Now, the rest of you: think of a very, very narrow interest. Keeping in the spirit of Hot Dish, let's go with a food item, say, meatballs.

Now, while you might think this would bring up like 10 extremely weird and unnecessary things, don't forget this is Etsy and way more people than you can imagine are getting their craft on and selling homemade goods on the site.

Instead, the search brings back 3 pages (more than 50 items), and while about half of them are indeed weird and unnecessary (there is a high incidence of spaghetti and meatball plates made out of felt, for example) there is also a handful of assorted, interesting and cool things, and they don't necessarily have anything to do with meatballs!

Take the $16 "spaghetti and meatballs necklace" for example, like meatballs in name only (avoid the matching earrings please). Not bad. Or this very cute $100 painting of a bulldog named "Meatball." Of course, if you do like meatballs in the first place, you're going to go bananas, especially if you have a baby. The "bright meatball man onesie" is completely precious.

Other successful food-related search terms: tacos, cupcakes, cherries and eggplant.

Etsy is sort of annoying in the same way Zappos.com is, where, even if you choose a color, size, heel height preference and price range it seems like hundreds and hundreds of items pop up. So while this is a highly imperfect science, it is one small way to harness it, especially if you get completely wigged when a search for, accessories for example, brings back 215,888 items (fact).

Oh, and here's the brief jerky, thanks to Stuffed Pheasant. Please please please someone get one.