The Gift Guide Continues

Foods that are good - and good for you. Along with a wonderful vintage menu.

ONE MORE REASON TO LOVE CHOCOLATE

You’ve heard of food as medicine, but now there’s candy as medicine.

I can’t vouch for the efficacy of the chocolate bars from The Functional Chocolate Company - but I think they’d make really swell gifts. After all, who wouldn’t welcome chocolates that offer freedom from pain?

VEGETABLE HEAVEN

I’m a huge fan of The Chef’s Garden in Huron Ohio (farmers Lee and Bob Jones are a big part of Food and Country, the film I made during Covid). Once you taste their spinach you’ll be hooked too: it is actually sweet and surprisingly buttery.

The Jones’ regeneratively grown vegetables are so nutritious that they’ve put together a few boxes intended to improve health. Their powerhouse vegetable box is filled with vegetables known to be dense in vitamins and minerals, and their high nitrate rescue and repair leafy greens box is even more nutrient dense.

This year they’ve added something new: a Christmas Story box inspired by the classic tale. The box (recipes included) features a duck raised right on their farm along with all the other makings of a fine Christmas dinner.

FOODIE FANTASY

Looking for a really lavish gift for a sophisticated food-lover? You might want to consider this holiday gift box from Blue Hill at Stone Barns, one of the world’s finest (and most interesting) restaurants.

Dan Barber and his crew are known for carefully sourcing their ingredients, so you can be sure that everything in this box is of the highest quality. The sweets are all handmade: the box includes gingerbread dark chocolate truffles, white chocolate yogurt cashews, roses des sables, holiday fruit cake, spiced honey, chocolate toffee bark, and concord grape, pear, and dulce de leche caramels.

I love looking back at this menu from one of the very first conferences on American Cuisine. Held in New Orleans in the early eighties, it was a pioneer in recognizing that we actually have a native cuisine, and that it varies from region to region.