Action Cookbook's Throughly Unbranded Holiday Gift Guide

The only gift guide you can be absolutely sure no one paid me to do. (Except you, I guess.)

Scott Hines

09 Dec 2025 — 9 min read

[waves cheerfully] Christmas is coming!

[leans in way too close, turns menacing] Christmas is coming!

There's just over two weeks until the big day, and if you're anything like me, your holiday shopping has progressed in alternating waves of casual confidence and absolute panic. I got off to a great start right after Thanksgiving – I knocked a few people off my list right away, and felt like I was way ahead of the game. 48 hours later I broke out into a cold sweat when I realized how much I still had left to do. (This happens every year.)

Inevitably, at some point along this emotional rollercoaster, I will succumb to the darkest urges of the mentally-blocked holiday shopper: I will click on an online gift guide.

Some of these gift guides are well-intentioned!

Heck, I've even written a few myself in the past, though they were largely in service of Doing A Bit:

Sadly, a large number of the holiday gift guides I come across – and there are a lot of them – are neither well-intentioned or useful, nor are they well-crafted absurdist bits. They're sponsored content masquerading as service journalism, sloppily-compiled lists of thinly-veiled advertisements for things that your loved ones neither need nor want. I'm not saying this to call anyone out (writers gotta eat!), but these lists don't help me; they usually send me even deeper into a spiral of holiday anxiety.

Wait, is my wife the kind of person who needs a USB-powered pen warmer for her home office? Are her pens too cold?? Should I know that about her???

I don't want that. I don't want that for you. I want the holidays to go smoothly, and I want the people you're giving gifts to to receive things they'll actually use.

So, I wrote a gift guide.

[everyone booing]

But!

[everyone stops booing for a second to hear what I have to say]

I assure you that this is not sponsored content.

[things settle into a discontented murmur, which I can live with]

In fact, I will go so far as to not recommend any specific brand here, nor will I directly link to any product. Instead, I'm going to suggest some simple, useful everyday products that I use a lot and would be happy to receive myself in a stocking, Secret Santa and/or Yankee Swap.

Are they fancy? Absolutely not. But they'll get used and appreciated, and that's more than I can say for the pen warmer.

1) A Bench Scraper

In my opinion, this cheap, simple kitchen tool marks the dividing line between a poorly-stocked kitchen and a smoothly-humming culinary machine. You can use it for dividing dough balls, sure, but keep one of these in your drawer long enough and you'll find you're using it for all sorts of things.

(Including occasionally even scraping a bench!)

2) 1/8th Sheet Pans

Thumbs-up for scale, but also for motivation. You're doing great!

These are the smallest standard sheet pans – roughly 6-1/2" x 9-1/2" – and it is my firm belief that you simply cannot have too many of them. They are always useful for something, and I need not to elaborate on a list of uses further than saying "personal nacho pan".

3) Miniature Loaf Pans

Continuing the "small pans" theme, these little guys come out of my pantry more often than you'd think.

Do you have these in your kitchen? Maybe, but probably not, right?

That means whoever you're giving a gift to probably doesn't either, but once you give these to them, they'll be able to make perfectly-sized banana breads, or a bunch of individual Detroit-style pizzas!

Wait, Scott, are you just taking pictures of things lying around your kitchen and calling it a gift guide?

I thought I was clear about that up front: yes.

This is (at least partially) a food blog, and I am recommending the things I actually use to make the food I blog about.

Such as:

4) A Danish Dough Whisk

This is a newer addition to my kitchen arsenal, at least relative to the other things listed here, but it's quickly become a favorite. Stiffer and wider than a normal kitchen whisk, it's great for mixing up bread dough, but I've also used mine for stirring up meatball mixtures.

Plus, it just looks neat!

5) A Mezzaluna

Cooking should be fun. That's an undercurrent in everything I do here at The Action Cookbook Newsletter, and rarely do I have more fun in the kitchen than when I get to pull this thing out and just go to town on chopping some herbs or whatever up.

Also, my kids are really getting to the age where they want to help out in the kitchen and are insulted when I won't let them chop stuff. They think this thing is super fun, and since both of their hands are on the knife, there's way less risk of them chopping a finger off.

(Never zero risk. But less.)

In fact, my son used this in helping me make an appetizer for our neighborhood Christmas party this past weekend, and the recipe for that–a dish that was very well-received, I might add–is coming up here on Friday for paying subscribers.

Not a full subscriber to the ACBN? Consider becoming one today!

It's not a branded recommendation if it's myself

6) Silicone Baking Mats

Thumbs up in this case to obscure the brand name that's printed on it, because I said this was a brand-free gift guide. But you're still doing great, and I'm proud of you.

Now, candidly speaking: do I hate cleaning these things after I use them? Yes. But do I use them a ton? Also yes, and it's way better cleaning them off than cleaning off something that's gotten stuck on my sheet pans.

(This one's a 1/4 sheet pan, by the way. Those are good for when you want Big Personal Nachos.)

7) A bunch of small glass bottles

Surely you've seen these pop up in my cocktail content over the years. At some point I bought a thing of like two dozen 5-ounce bottles, which is the perfect size for storing all the cocktail syrups, tinctures, infusions and potions I make.

It turns out I would totally be okay with receiving another couple dozen of these, because every one I could find at the time of writing this had something in it. The one pictured above turned out to be leftover Black Tea Syrup from my Kentucky Creek Water cocktail back in October. (I should probably ditch it by now, but that's beside the point.) The drink was good and the bottles are useful, and not just for harboring cocktail syrups in my fridge door for months at a time.

The person you're giving these to? They'll have a use for them. Maybe they'll use them as bud vases. Maybe they'll make sand art in them. Maybe they'll scribble an SOS message and toss it into the ocean. Not my business. You give a bunch of small bottles to someone, and if they don't immediately imagine a use for them? You dump them, and you dump them fast.

That's the ACBN version of "The Door Test" from A Bronx Tale.

I think I might be getting off track. Nevertheless!

8) Magnetic Measuring Spoons

If you can imagine from the previous recommendations, my kitchen tool drawer is a mess. The only orderly part is this set of magnetic measuring spoons my wife got me a couple years ago, and I get great delight in snapping them together into an orderly stack after I inevitably use all of them when measuring out an unnecessarily-complicated cocktail recipe like the one that's coming Friday.

Once again I must suggest you treat yourself to some Premium Internet by upgrading to a full subscription to The Action Cookbook Newsletter. It's only $5/month or $50/year and it never contains ads, as evidenced today!

C'mon, buy yourself something nice

9) Just a bunch of deli containers

"Scott, I can't just give someone a bunch of plastic deli containers for Christmas."

Oh, I'm sorry, is there a law against doing that now? Is there some law that says you can't give them the capacity to freeze leftovers after they've enjoyed a meal?? A succulent ACBN meal???

These are the most unglamorous things in my kitchen and I would never be upset to have more of them. In fact, my freezer is currently full of them, because Thanksgiving isn't over until I say it's over:

5pm on Thanksgiving, the traditional “making stock from the turkey carcass against my wife’s express stated wishes” hour
— actioncookbook (@actioncookbook.com) 2024-11-28T21:52:43.067Z

Kids love these too, and they're cheap enough that it's okay if they ruin them building sandcastles or whatever. Whoever you give these to may not be impressed immediately, but they will eventually be appreciative.

If nothing else, they can pretend they're The Bear from The Bear when they're drinking out of them.

"Two days into the kids' Christmas break" energy

10) Fancy sea salt

I said I wasn't going to link to any brands, but Maldon sea salt has a Wikipedia page and it's a 143-year-old brand so I feel like I'm staying with the spirit of the exercise if not the letter of it by suggesting it here.

A few years ago, my wife bought me a comically-large tub of this large-flake sea salt. I was grateful for the gift, but I also said at the time "how on Earth are we ever going to finish all of this?"

This stuff is meant for finishing, and while it's great – a few crystals are the perfect flourish on top of a steak or some eggs or even my extremely-good-and-timely-for-the-holidays Salted Bourbon Brown Butter Derby Bars–