For Chefs: Kitchen Gifts
On the Cheap: Ever scraped your knuckles on a shoddy box grater while trying to shred a pound of cheddar cheese? Save your skin with a Microplane Ultra Coarse Grater. This compact hero of the kitchen grates potatoes, vegetables, and soft cheeses quickly and uniformly with its razor-sharp blades, and its rubber base prevents it from slipping on the counter—or slicing your fingers. Price: $19.99.
Everything in Moderation: Measuring cups are so 2005—to ensure truly accurate measurements for cooking ingredients, an Oxo Good Grips Food Scale is just the ticket; it’s also ideal for people concerned about portion sizing. This scale weighs up to eleven pounds of food and features a pull-out display for easy reading, a tare function, and measurements in both ounces and grams. Price: $46.70.
The Sky’s the Limit: For cooking connoisseurs who want to have the culinary world at their fingertips, the HP TouchSmart 600 is a tantalizing luxury item. Smart-touch partnerships with Twitter, Netflix, and Hulu make this all-in-one PC a good choice for any room in the house, but its standout feature is its Recipe Box touch program, which CNET.com’s editors deem the “best kitchen app we’ve seen”; it enables users to import recipes from the Web and add their own to the box. Price: $1,049.99.
For Tree-Huggers: Eco-Friendly Gifts
On the Cheap: For urban green thumbs without a single patch of dirt to call their own, salvation has arrived in the form of the Power Plant Growing Machine. Based on a NASA-tested process called aeroponics, this device grows plants without soil by using a microjet system to strengthen seedlings’ roots with hyperoxygenated, nutrient-filled water. Add water to the nutrient mix included with the Power Plant, sow seeds on the sponge, and sit back while your garden-in-a-box grows before your eyes. Price: $58.00.
Everything in Moderation: You can spend all day turning off lights, shutting off the faucet, and biting your nails about how much your next electric bill is going to be, or you can pick up an Energy Detective 5000-G. This nifty monitoring device provides real-time data on home energy use, allowing people to predict their total costs long before they receive their bills; in addition, its TED Footprints software helps owners log and track usage on their home computers. Price: $199.95.
The Sky’s the Limit: Every laptop owner out there worries about running out of battery power at crucial moments. Instead of searching airports and coffee shops in vain for an outlet to plug your computer into, go green with a SolarGorilla Solar Charger. This portable device contains two photovoltaic solar panels that provide up to six hours of juice for most laptops, cell phones, iPods, PDAs, and handheld games. Price: $249.85.
Give and Let Give
Holiday generosity is always appreciated as a concept, but the reality of gift giving is that the thought isn’t always what counts. And you don’t have to break the bank to please people, either—inexpensive, useful presents that account for the recipients’ individual interests and personalities almost always score higher points than pricey, impractical baubles that will just end up in storage boxes. And who wants to be one of those people, anyway—the ones who induce groans every year when they hand out identical sweaters embroidered with Scotties to all their relatives? This holiday season, don’t get caught slippin’.
