Tag: X-Mas

2018 Holiday Guide: Gifts for Sausage Making at Home

Shawn 1 Comment

My wife and I have somehow found ourselves with a bit of time off this holiday season and have decided this is the year to indulge in our strange, shared desire to make sausage. Don’t laugh; I’ve wanted to craft tube meat since I attended the NVICA event back in April and Crystal’s been saying we pay too much for prefabs forever.

So we pooled our meager pre-Christmas funds and went in on a sausage stuffer, not knowing that it takes a wee bit more gear to actually get stuffing. A quick peek through all the charcuterie books on my shelf and a couple eleventh hour Amazon orders later we now have a complete kit for sausage making ready for a holiday sausage party. Read More

2017 Holiday Gift Guide: What To Get A Young Prep Cook?

Shawn 1 Comment

Continuing our recent trend of posts about mentoring all the fresh new faces joining our industry, I whipped up a Holiday gift guide for this year focused on all the stuff that a brand new cook would need to get started in a kitchen. We’re talking about someone green, first day of culinary school green. Finally made it out of the dishpit and is about to chop their first onion green. Read More

2014 Holiday Guide : Ten Gifts For Geeky Cooks

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2014 Holiday Gift Guide - GeeksAs many sharp readers may have guessed, I’m not only a cook, amateur writer and degenerate wastrel, but a huge… And I mean HUGE geek. Capital G!

I love 80s ‘wrasslin, comic books, Godzilla flicks and nostalgic video games almost as much as love shaping dumplings or searing duck breasts. So when I was researching my 2014 Holiday Guides (plural, I also have a gift guide for foragers in the works that probably won’t make it out before X-Mas) I was floored by the massive amount of geek-centric kitchen gifts available to the internet-savvy public.

Sites like Nerd Approved, Archie MacPhee’s, and Pintrest led me down a long ‘n dark rabbit hole of nerdy kitchen accessories. This stuff is serious kitsch… It’s like the internet knows me!

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2014 Holiday Guide : Ten Gifts For Pro Cooks and Chefs

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2014 Holiday Guide - Pro CooksHoliday shopping sucks.

It should be fun and joyful, but most of it is a florescent-lit hell of shopping cart lines, tinny Sinatra music and a dull nagging doubt that you (yes you) could have done better… Could have found that perfect gift for the one you love! Instead every year is a bit of a compromise, a sell out. And every year another promise to get it right… Next year.

No longer! “Next year” is this year, and your good buddy The Internet is here to save you from another long, soul destroying slog through Wal Mart. This year you can point and click your way to the perfect gift for everyone on your list, including your buddies in the culinary industry!

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