Give chocolates in an edible chocolate box.
Photo courtesy Charles Chocolates.

If you’re still stuck for that special Christmas gift, this chocolate box from Charles Chocolates may be the solution.

It’s all chocolate, including the box!

The dark chocolate or milk chocolate selections are in a base of dark or milk chocolate, with a milk chocolate or white chocolate lid. The box is filled with 18 pieces of Charles’ Chocolates most popular bonbons. Including the box, each box is a pound of chocolate.

The chocolate boxes are $60.00 each, but there’s a special offer now: two boxes for $95 (instead of $120).

Purchase online at CharlesChocolates.com.

• Find more of our favorite chocolate gifts for Holiday 2010.

Your photos of Christmas dinner can look a lot better this year.

Prominent food photographer Lou Manna, recognized by the elite Olympus Visionary Program, offers 13 tips for better food photography.

1. Keep your composure.

2. Take a fork’s-eye view.

3. Limit your ingredients.

4. Give your food a sense of style.

5. Clean your plate.

6. Crack the ISO code.

Get full details of these six tips plus the remaining seven food photography tips.

Improve your game [hen]. Photo © Lou Manna.

Our favorite: Breville’s One-Touch
Tea Maker. Photo courtesy Breville.

We love tea and drink several cups a day. The Breville One-Touch Tea Maker is our Appliance Of The Year.

We’ve tried most of the other sophisticated tea makers out there (different brewing times and/or temperatures for black, green, white and herbal teas). This is the best.

Breville’s One-Touch Tea Maker has forever changed the way we brew tea.

With the perfect temperature per type of tea (black, green, herbal, white) and your instructions on how strong you want it, this Breville beauty brews the best tea we’ve ever had. Even teas we haven’t liked taste amazingly better.

It’s fun watching the tea basket lower and brew. You can auto-set the appliance so tea is ready the minute you get out of bed, get home, etc. Over the summer, we brewed two batches daily, which we poured into pitchers and also into re-purposed empty water bottles for grab-and-go iced tea.

We are in love with this appliance. It’s worth every bit of $249.95. Find it at fine retailers and online.

Need something to bring to Christmas dinner? We’re updating this popular post from last year:

Make a beautiful red-and-green Christmas salad by adding “red” greens to your vegetable mix. Or make a colorful and delicious beet salad.

CHRISTMAS SALAD RECIPE

If you can’t find the more exotic red lettuces—red endive, red leaf lettuce, red mustard greens, red oak lettuce, red romaine and the new red watercress—most stores carry the naturally red-veined chard, baby kale and radicchio. If you like, you can mix them with regular green leaf lettuces; but we prefer to keep our Christmas salad in holiday colors.

If you don’t want to make a Christmas salad
with greens, a beet salad has the same
holiday colors. Photo by Sarsmis | IST.

 
BEET SALAD

Lacking the time to make pickled beets from scratch, we used Aunt Nellie’s Pickled Beets & Onions to make this quick salad:

Ingredients

 
PreparationIngredients

1. Empty beets into a large bowl.

2. We used the liquid in the pickled beets for the salad dressing. If you want you can add a small amount of olive oil to taste.

3. Mix in the spinach/chard and basil leaves.

4. Place into serving dish. Top with goat cheese and sprinkle on walnuts.
  

One reason to buy fresh blueberries now is to make this easy and delicious Blueberry Cranberry Relish, delicious with Christmas turkey and ham.

RECIPE: FRESH BLUEBERRY & CRANBERRY RELISH

This recipe is best made a day or two in advance to let flavors blend. It makes 12 quarter-cup servings.

Ingredients

1. COMBINE all ingredients in a medium saucepan over medium heat.

2. COOK until the sugar dissolves and the berries soften, for about 15 minutes. Remove from heat, cover and chill.

Nutrients per serving: calories 76, fat 0, cholesterol 0, sodium 0, dietary fiber 0, protein 0.
 
SERVING SUGGESTIONS

 
Also see our recipe for Cranberry Relish With Port.

While you’re at it, make a Frozen Cranberry Margarita, Cranberry Mojito or Crantini (cranberry martini).