10 Best Gifts For Food Lovers

Got a Voracious Vicki and a Carnivorous Clyde on your Christmas gifting list? A tie or scarf will not do. So we've scouted out the best particularly Pacific Northwest-y gifts for your friends and fam who love all the eats, categorized by gifting scenario.

1. Eager for Engagement: Steaks (Obviously)

snakeriverfarms.com / Via snakeriverfarms.com

The only thing on earth as tender and raw as your love and desire to get that on-one-knee-little-box-shiny-rock experience somewhere between Santa day and Pink & Red Day is beautifully marbled and aged, hand cut Prime beef. It's the gift that says, like Prime steak, you are the top 1% of my life. What? Did you think we were going to ease into this? Gifting got serious, fast.

Our Pick: Thoughtfully selected American Kobe or Prime Northwest Beef from snakeriverfarms.com. Shopping and ordering online is easy, and your love probably won't go peeping around for their presents in the freezer.

2. Hot for the Hostess: Gourmet Spices

Spiceologist / Via spiceologist.com

Real talk time: there's a 100% chance you're not exiting the party until the table wine dead soldier count is 100% and they're cracking into a certain favorite Columbia Valley Cab you "generously gifted" the party hosts. So, it doesn't count. Don't wake up with a pounding head full of purple lipped shame. In addition to the vino, bring something portable, fun and unique for the hostess with the most-ess like a delicious spice blend.

Our Pick: Spiceologist gourmet rubs and customizable spice blocks are available on their website, locations around Washington, and Williams-Sonoma. Local food blogger Heather Scholten and chef Peter Taylor are concocting, producing and shipping their brand of pure spicy goodness from Spokane, all about the country.

3. Stuff Stockings: Protein Style

HTTP://GIF-WEENUS.TUMBLR.COM / Via giphy.com

Keep all the giving gifters and Christmas meal makers happier and healthier by placing protein powered beef jerky snack bags up in their stockings. Chewing jerky is like the antidote to family holiday fights. Just try completing an insensitive comment directed at your insufferable vegetarian cousin with a mouth full of jerky. Difficult to impossible (just keep chewing). Peace on Earth. Via jerky. You're welcome.

Also good gifting for: Your kids' teachers, coaches, babysitters, etc. You know they need the extra energy to put up with your rugrats all the year long.

Our Pick: Oberto Beef Jerky, 3.25 oz snack bags in a variety of flavors, retailing for $5-6 each. DYK? Oberto is headquartered in Kent, WA where they slice, cure, smoke, package and distribute this treat.

4. Aspiring Home Chef: A Year of Meal Planning

Audra Mulkern / Via chefkirstenhelle.com

File under: the opposite of crap your friends and family don't need. Gifting a year of meal planning is the ultimate in thoughtful, cluttery-junk-less gifting. Giving a healthy meal planning service can actually help your loved one remove the junk from their cooking - resulting in balanced, easy to prepare, whole foods based family meals all year long.

Our Pick: Local Chef Kirsten Helle's Healthy Weeknight Dinners . For $99 lifetime or $9.95 per month subscribers receive a weekly meal plan and grocery shopping list. Her specialties are "healthified" versions of classic American and Latin American dishes. She's a personal chef serving some of our favorite Seattle Seahawks and their families, pretty sure she can help your husband's cousin's wife cook more meals at home in 2016.

5. Home Chef Who Hates Grocery Shopping: Meal Delivery Service

Blue Apron / Via blueapron.com

About the time the dust settles on the holiday season is the same time mommy ceases the ability to control her facial expression in reaction to any dinner request that requires another trip to the grocery store. We feel you on that moms. Thank goodness the internet is now teeming with services offering to cut out that crucially annoying step, delivering meal components or entire meals that are big steps up from the pantry recourse of a blue boxed nature. These services are highly gift-able, and will be greatly appreciated by Jan. 1 if not sooner.

Our Picks: AmazonFresh is making everything from buying beef cuts to ordering your favorite Ramen fixins from Samarai Noodle online, delivered to your doorstep, a thing. We've had great experiences with Blue Apron, where we've found packages of Northwest favorite Country Natural Beef in our box, begging to be made into the most delicious stir fry. And that happened. Putting real clothes on never had to. Glorious.

6. Home Chef (Level: Boss): Part of a Cow

WABeef / Via wabeef.org

For the carnivore who has it all, it's time to level up and fill their freezer with carefully selected cuts from a local boutique butcher, or a portion (whole, half, or quarter) of a bovine sourced from a local farm. Make sure they have room in the freezer for all this goodness. Or even better, recreate one of those cheesy commercials where the one spouse puts a big red bow on the other spouse's new car in the driveway. But with a new chest freezer in the garage. Full of meat. Hopeless romantics, that's us.

Our Pick: You're going to have to do some leg work to find the right option. Lucky for you, we created a local beef directory on wabeef.org to help guide your search for butcher shops and farmers & ranchers who sell to the public. Use the drop down menu to select your county and go from there.

7. Home Chef (Level: Millennial): Seattle Cooking Class

Instagram/@WABeefLove / Via @WABeefLove

You're friends with your brother's 25 year old daughter on the Facebooks and Instagram. She and her boyfriend are always sharing photos of elaborate meals like braised short ribs and sashimi platters. At restaurants. How on Earth are these kids keeping up on their student loans when they eat out this much?

Based on your sister in law's cooking, gifting your niece some outside culinary instruction could be all she needs to put her interest in food to budget-friendly use in her condo kitchen. P.S. if you get the Egg Nog induced urge to share your opinion about SIL's cooking, please don't. Per #3, keep chewing. Law enforcement is busy enough this time of year.

Our Picks: Understanding this type of need, we launched the At the Kitchen Counter with Beef cooking class series. For $30 per person (benefiting our Beef Counts at Food Lifeline charity), a ticket for her and her BF is an affordable way to gift priceless life skills. Like the saying goes, take a millennial out for tacos and they'll Instagram it, then eat. Teach them to make a beef stew and they'll Instagram that, but also have meals for days. Other top picks around the city are classes at The Pantry and Tom Douglas' Hot Stove Society.

8. For the Millennial Hipster: Foodie Tee

Instagram/@WABeefLove

What else are they going to wear to attend a cooking class, squirt Sriracha on their mobile food truck finds, swill local craft spirits, or browse the farmers market? Nothing coordinates with a flannel shirt and a full beard like a foodie tee. Except for maybe skinny jeans and the juxtaposition of a carefully gelled hairstyle. The lumbersexual look is so confusing!

Our Pick: Fun food fashion from L.A. based Bad Pickle Tees. The "What's Your Beef" tee is our obvious favorite, but "All That and Dim Sum" and other foodie wit meets cotton designs are equally delicious.

9. Home Chef: Kitchen Gadgets

Bridget Coon / Via ranchwifelife.com

Ok, this is the only item making the list that could be accused of clutter. But it's only clutter if it doesn't get used. And even if it doesn't, decorative gadgets like the PepperBall (pictured) look really cool collecting dust.

Our Pick: A PepperBall or best-selling GarlicZoomXL. We had the chance to meet David Holcomb, CEO of Seattle based Chef'n at their headquarters and R&D lab across from C-Link on 4th. Gotta love a colorful backstory and products made with passion that work really well. Bonus conversation starter: give your peeps one chance to guess what the (recently legalized) alternative use for the GarlicZoom is that makes sales in the Evergreen state steady. Where to buy (the gadgets).

10. For You, Pinterest Curating Over Acheiving Gifter: DIY Steak Gift Basket

Morton's Gourmet Market / Via mortonsmarket.com

If the rest of these ideas are way too basic for your hands on, hot glue gun wielding, hand crafted insomniac enthusiasm then by all means, create an elaborate, meaty gift basket that would make the Hickory Farms and Harry and David people collectively weep and question their existence. This one's for you, because we're just not sure what red and green sparkly tulle, hand-glued fake holly and over-sized red velvet bows have to do with juicy, marbled, medium rare bites of steak.

Our Pick: Clearly this head elf business is beyond our simple carnivore pay grade, so you are pretty much on your own. If we were nuts enough to send all of our guests home with such a creation, we'd probably start by cutting steaks from a whole beef Rib sourced from either Costco or a local butcher shop, vaccuum seal, and add other items from this list like a fun spice rub, bottle of Washington red, and a couple of sharp steak knives. No Easy Button for you, overachieving Christmas gifter lady. We salute you.

But you better go ahead and take our stocking jerky. You need it more than us!