Bostonist Gift Guide: Spread Good Cheer with Chow

Bostonist finds that food makes a great gift for even the most difficult to shop for. Some of our favorite local food purveyors have made it easy for us with food-of-the-month clubs. We’d be thrilled to receive the gift of pork from Savenor’s, which has a bacon-of-the-month club. For something sweet, Pemberton Farms of Cambridge has a coffee-cake-of-the-month club and plenty of locally themed gift baskets. Formaggio Kitchen, famous for having its own cheese cave, has a cheese-of-the-month club. If that’s too pricey, we recommend just stopping in at either their Cambridge or South End location, and picking out a few choice items yourself. For your tea-loving grannie, a gift set from Tea Luxe might be a good idea (the $19.95 “Christmas mailbox” gift set caught our eye: it comes with a glass mug, mesh tea ball, jar of sugar cubes, and 100 grams of gingerbread tea).

And for anyone who appreciates the Boston restaurant scene but also loves to cook, we suggest the recent cookbook by Clara Silverstein, The Boston Chef’s Table: The Best in Contemporary Cuisine. It has more than 100 recipes from a wide variety of local restaurants… everything from Blue Ginger’s lychee cranberry shortcake by Ming Tsai to Boston baked beans from the Union Oyster-House.
Bacon photo from Savenorsmarket.com.