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Oooooooooh boy, you're really cutting it close now. Thankfully, Amazon Prime still gives you free two day shipping for all of the shopping you left to the lastest of minutes, and you can even sign up for a free 30 day trial and cancel it afterwards if you don't have it. But if you're reading this, you still probably have a couple of people you have to find gifts for.
Well, luckily for you we have a handful of gift guides if you're straight out of ideas, which you can check out below. Today we're throwing one more onto the pile: Gifts for people who are wizards in the kitchen. Here are my personal selections, all of which you're recipient will love.
Part One: beauty and cosmetics
Part Three: Gifts for fashionable women
For the baker: Digital kitchen scale by Etekcity, $9-$14
Every serious baker has a digital scale in their kitchen which lets them most precisely measure ingredients for their bakes, no matter what kinds of flours they're using. I've been using this one from Etekcity for a couple of weeks now, and with four kinds of unit measurements, it's as good as they get.
For the cheese whizz: Microplane grater by Microplane, $10-$15
If you finish your dishes with as much hard cheese and lemon zest as I do, you know that the best way to get perfect, feathery strands of everything is with a microplane grater. Thankfully, they happen to be really cheap.
For the meatmaster: Instant read digital thermometer by Lavatools, $25
The "is my chicken done yet?" guessing game is fun until you guess wrong. With an instant-read digital waterproof like the one I own from Lavatools, leave the guessing up to a finely tuned machine. Never mush your steak with a finger to check doneness ever again: Just poke this little guy in and let science do the work for you.
For the serious meatmaster: Sous vide immersion cooker by Anova, $100-$200
We're huge fans of Anova's sous vide immersion cooker, such big fans that I bought my father-in-law one for Christmas. It's a little machine that cooks stuff to exact temperatures by circulating water around it, and all you gotta do is throw your food in a plastic bag, add flavorings and put it in a pot of water to do it. There are two models (the fancy one has wifi), but it's as good of a kitchen gift as it gets.
For the farmers market devotee: Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables by Joshua McFadden, $12-$22
Ava Gene's head chef Joshua McFadden's vegetable-centric new cookbook is really, really really fucking good. So good I barely want to cook out of anything else. If you're committed to seasonal cooking, it probably doesn't get any better than this.
For the all-rounder home cook (with a sweet tooth): Smitten Kitchen Every Day, $21
I haven't had a chance to write a review of Deb Perelmen's New Yorker-approved new cookbook. Suffice to say, it's an excellent selection of simple recipes, with an expansive selection of desserts, that's built to feed an omnivorous family that's short on time. The bulgogi beef tacos I made yesterday from this book in 30 minutes will be a regular part of my weeknight rotation.
(Cool Stuff is a new feature at Willamette Week where we feature product reviews, roundups, sales and other commerce and shopping-oriented content. All Cool Stuff reviews are editorially independent, meaning we provide honest reviews and aren't paid by the brands we write about. If you do choose to purchase something after following one of our links, Willamette Week may receive a commission, which helps fund our journalism.)