Valentine’s Day gifts for your food lover.
Valentine’s Day presents that revolve around food make the best gifts. Because we all know that the couple who eats, cooks and drinks together, stays together.
If you’re ready to graduate from chocolates, here are four unique options:
A skillet for the ages
A century back, copper pans were a necessity for any serious cook—who for starters would not consider making jam in any other kind of saucepan. The soaring—if volatile—price of the resource helped change that. So did the improved science of multi–ply saucepan construction—their aluminium or copper inserts doing a great job of heat dispersion for a fraction of the cost. But despite all that, there is nothing quite so beautiful and functional as the real thing. Every good cook deserves at least one. Make it one to remember like this classic by Mauviel.
Price $179.95-269.95 size depending at Williams-Sonoma
Every wine lover needs this
When in his book Modernist Cuisine Dr. Nathan Myhrvold asserted that ordinary table wine tasted a lot better after a quick aerating blitz in the bar blender, many an oenophile was mortified. Then they tried it and found that, as usual, Myhrvold was right. With this new, $80 decanter from the makers of the Rabbit bottle opener, you can perform the same trick with a little more dining room-appropriate panache—and a gentleness that’s correct for fine wines.
Go to rabbitwine.com
The egg guillotine
If your love has a weakness for dining in swanky French restaurants during truffle season, you have probably found yourselves gazing wistfully at that perfectly decapitated eggshell filled with truffle-laced scrambled egg. How—oh, how—do chefs slice the top off the egg so perfectly? Easily, as it happens. All you need is this percussive egg topper (and, if you like, some fine sandpaper to finish). These devices used to be hard to find even at the finest kitchen shops—and expensive, too. Now, you can pick one up on Amazon for the price of a small truffle, about $39.
As sweet as Leslieville honey?
Urban beekeeping outfit Alvéole’s clever selection of premium-quality neighbourhood honey is artisanally produced in urban areas. Each honey has a particular colour and flavour, unique to the floral diversity of the neighbourhood they frequent. The Montreal set has Villeray / NDG-Westmount / Saint-Henri / Plateau, Quebec City bees cover Cap-Rouge / Limoilou / Montcalm / Sillery, and Toronto bees are working the Cabbagetown / Junction / Leslieville / Rosedale hoods.
