Disclaimer: I don’t know you. I don’t know your wife or your husband or your kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles, dogs, friends, or anybody else. So if I recommend something here and you say to yourself, “My aunt wife dog friend wouldn’t like this,” then trust yourself.
All I can tell you is that these are products I’ve tried and I’ve enjoyed. They’re just my recommendations based on my preferences. If they match up with someone in your life, great. If not, well, sorry?
Being a very minor local foodie in a very minor local food scene, I get asked a lot of questions. Most of them are, “Who has the best burger in Oklahoma?” (My answer: That depends on what you’re looking for…) But sometimes, especially around gift-giving holidays that fall near the end of the year, people want to know what to get for the foodie in their life.
TOP FOODIE GIFT OF 2024
Money.
Get them money.
Food costs a lot (even more than ever lately) and people who love food are scraping by just like people who only eat protein blocks with names like STRV and XCLL. They want to go out to the local restaurants, but they’re broke, so if you want to make them happy, try giving them cash.
But if that seems too impersonal, you’ll be happy to hear that there are plenty of more personal (if less easy to trade for food) gifts out there that your foodie might love slightly less than an all-expenses-paid dinner at Gray Sweater, Tokyo Japanese Restaurant, or Cattleman’s Steakhouse.
FOR PEOPLE WHO ENTERTAIN
Personally, I cannot fathom wanting people to visit my house, but I married someone who very much wants people to visit our house, and she’s pretty much my boss, so sometimes we have people over. And while it’s usually up to me to do the cooking, it also falls to me to do the plating and the table setting and that’s when I break out the Stone Lain.
As we were both on our second marriages, Jess and I didn’t ask for fancy servingware this go around. That’s fine when you’re just serving your kids or your parents or other people whose opinions don’t matter, but when you’ve got someone you think is cool coming by, you want to fancy it up a bit.
We got a set of Stone Lain’s Senso bone china plates and bowls in black. The textured pieces here feel weighty and expensive, but they’re surprisingly affordable. Not to say that $150 is nothing, but four large dinner plates, four large dinner bowls, and four smaller (but still pretty big) pasta bowls, it’s a good deal.
The dark black plates look striking against a pale white mushroom risotto topped with gently roasted smoked salmon and asparagus spears, and the dinner bowls are perfect for meals that could get a little messy, like when we made a batch of croque madames for a fancy brunch.
Stone + Lain Senso New Bone China Black Dinnerware Set | 12-Piece – stonelain.co
FOR PIZZA ENTHUSIASTS
Do you know who likes pizza? Everyone. And if you meet someone who says they don’t like pizza, you’ve captured a spy. Probably from an alien civilization. Proceed with caution.
But for literally everyone else, pizza is a party waiting to happen. The one problem with making your own pizza is that most home ovens do not have that oomph necessary to make a truly spectacular Neapolitan-style pie or a crispy-chewy New York-style pizza.
Home pizza ovens have grown in popularity, but it wasn’t until I tried the Newair Electric Pizza Oven that I found one that worked for me.
Unlike some ovens that require a gas hookup or a live wood fire, the Newair is just an ultra-powerful electric version with a pizza stone and coils that can climb well past the 500-or-so degrees of most kitchen ovens. And because you can plug it in anywhere, I can make pizzas on the back porch without heating up the house/setting off my too-sensitive home smoke alarms.
If there’s one downside to the Newair, it’s the instruction manual, which is literally just an instruction manual. No recipes. No tips for making your pizzas better. So if you get this for someone, consider throwing in a book with a variety of dough recipes, so they won’t feel obligated to just shove a Tombstone in there.
Electric PIzza Oven for Indoor and Outdoor Use | Newair
FOR INGREDIENT HOARDERS
Some nights, I’m just not cooking. You know that feeling? Whether it’s making dinner for the kids or just eating solo, there are times when I’m so worn out, I can’t make myself get in that kitchen for anything more than a bowl of cereal. And I’m tired of feeling guilty about it!
Enter the Ambrosia Produce Bags. Each washable linen bag is designed slightly differently to help you stretch the viability of your produce by days and weeks.
Was I skeptical? Yes. But after following the instructions (y’all, please read instructions before you complain about something not working), I found that the bunches of butter lettuce and romaine I’d purchased stayed crispier and greener for longer than when I stored them in their original packages. Same goes for mushrooms in the mushroom bag.
If I could only get one, I’d probably go for the large vegetable bag, which has kept carrots, green onions, celery, squash, and more fresh through those “I can’t cook” nights so they’d be ready when I finally got up the gumption.
Maximize the Shelf-Life of Fresh Produce – Ambrosia Long-Life Linen
My wife has a weird wheat allergy. Too much of it will make her seriously miserable, especially if it's made with GMO wheat. Never really knew it was a thing before she came along, but I've seen the effects and, as such, I make bread. Sometimes in a bread machine. Sometimes in the oven, like a caveman. And fresh bread is the best. Amazing. 10 stars!!!
Stale bread? Not nearly as good. Which is why I was SO EXCITED by the Keeki Bags. These beeswax lined bags start out stiff, but turn supple with use, and they're amazing at prolonging the life of your breads. If you've moved beyond buying the preservative-filled loaves of grocery store breads to making your own fresh, but perishable, breads, the Keeki is for you.
Keekibags - Keep it Fresh for Longer – Keeki.com
FOR COOKBOOK COLLECTORS
Before Pinterest, if one can fathom such a chaotic time, even before the Internet, there were these things that…how can I describe them?
Imagine if someone went to your food blog and printed off not just your recipes, but also your blog posts about creating recipes, and then formatted them into a deluxe collection of sorts. A cooking book, if you will.
Well, you’ll be shocked to hear this, but these cooking books still exist. In fact, people are still making new ones and I, both a collector and reader of things, still love to hunker down on the couch with a big magnifying glass (when did type get so small?) to search for new recipes with which to pester my loved ones.
Allyson Reedy’s 30 Breads to Bake Before You Die spoke to me as one of those people who inexplicably waited until after the pandemic to get really into bread. The recipes are well-written, easy to follow, and make some really tasty loaves. One word of advice: make sure you’ve got the right equipment before you get started. If I had any issue, it was with some of the recipe sizes. Those honey wheat sandwich loaves tasted great, but I surely didn’t need four of them all at once.
30 Breads to Bake Before You Die | Ulysses Press
I found Slow: Easy, Comforting Italian Meals Worth Waiting For, by Gennaro Contaldo to be a bit misleading. It’s definitely about slow cooking and it’s definitely a collection of comforting Italian meals worth waiting for, but I kind of envisioned myself doing the Italian grandma routine, slaving over a giant stockpot of ragu for hours on end while yelling at my grandchildren to stop horsing around on my Vespa. Then I remembered my kids aren’t old enough to have their own kids and I don’t own a Vespa.
Yes, these are slow-cooking dishes, but they’re mostly hands-off recipes, meaning you can leave it to your various appliances to man the store while you explain how fun and offensive some Italian hand signals can be.
Slow | Book by Gennaro Contaldo, David Loftus | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster
Christmas, a holiday marked by excess, is quickly followed by New Year's Day, which is a holiday marked by people claiming they're going to be a better person during this trip around the sun. My wife is eager to do all sorts of sustainable, money-saving things in our backyard and kitchen, which is why I thought The Conscious Kitchen: A Beginner's Guide to Creating a Sustainable, No-Waste Kitchen for a Healthier Home and Planet (WOW, that's a long title!) would be a great read.
And I was right! Look, if you're already living off the grid, raising your own mutton, and crafting buttons from acorns, you probably don't need this. But if you're a regular family looking to do a few little things to save cash and maybe the planet, Immy Lucas' book is a great place to start.
ACTUAL FOODSTUFFS
Taste is extremely subjective, which is why buying food as gifts is so fraught. I don't think my palate is the perfect distillation of taste, but an inordinate amount of people trust my tastes, so I guess I'm fine with making recommendations.
My obsession with the cuisine of New Mexico runs deep and that's why I was extremely stoked to try a few jars of Los Roast. This New Mexico-based company has products ranging from simple roast red and green chiles to salsas to traditional red sauces that will provide a spicy boost to anything you're making. And if, for some reason, you're not sure what to make, the fine folks at Los Roast have plenty of recipes on their site as inspiration.
