An inexpensive luxury: truffle butter on
bread. Photo by Melody Lan | THE NIBBLE.

You can enjoy the flavor and aroma of black and white truffles every day of the year with 3-ounce tubs of truffle butter for $7.99 or 8 ounces for a few dollars more.

D’Artagnans truffle butter, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week, is our favorite little indulgence. For the price of a cocktail, you can have a three-ounce tub of precious, sweet butter, chock-full of black or white truffle pieces. It’s almost as satisfying as a fresh truffle dish that costs more than $100.00 at fine restaurants.

• Spread truffle butter on French rolls or slices of baguette as a snack, with meals or as an hors d’oeuvre with wine.
• Make truffled scrambled eggs. Add an ounce of buttermilk for each egg and scramble in truffle butter. Garnish with finely snipped parsley and serve with a slice of toasted baguette “crouton” spread with more truffle butter.

• Toss truffle butter with angel hair pasta.
• Butter a baked potato.
• Add a spoonful to sauces.You’ll be in truffle heaven for less than $10.
• Read our review of D’Artagnan truffle butter.

One way we enjoy truffles in a more affordable form is through truffle cheese and truffle honey, which incorporate small pieces of truffle that have broken off from the fab fungi. They smell and taste as wonderful as the whole truffle.

Murray’s Cheese has put together a truffle lover’s gift set that includes:

• Cypress Grove Chevre’s Truffle Tremor, one of our favorite cheeses and a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week
• Creminelli Brothers’ tartufo (truffle) salame,* another NIBBLE Top Pick
• Delectable white truffle honey from truffle specialist Da Rosario, a Top Pick contender.

* “Salame” is how Italians spell it. “Salami” is an American adaptation.

Three ways to enjoy truffles. Photo
courtesy MurraysCheese.com.

• See more of our favorite gourmet food gifts for Holiday 2010.
• See all 100+ holiday gift ideas, conveniently divided into 14 gift lists from Diet and Kids to Kitchenware and Stocking Stuffers.
• Learn all about truffles in our Truffle Glossary.

Choose from a wide variety of books, including
My Life In France by Julia Child.

BookSwim may be your answer. With a Netflix-like subscription to the online book rental program, you can create a pool of books to read from an extensive catalogue, and then have the books shipped straight to your door. When you’re finished enjoying the books, you just ship them back in a pre-paid envelope.

BookSwim is giving one lucky Nibble reader a three-month subscription to its three-books-at-a-time plan. Choose books from Cooking, Food & Wine and nonfood categories. Read them yourself or share with a friend.

Approximate retail value: $72.00.

To find out more about the online book rental program, visit BookSwim.com.

• To Enter This Gourmet Giveaway: Go to the box at the bottom of our Best Books For Healthy Eating Gifts Page and click to enter your email address for the prize drawing. This contest closes on Monday, December 6th at noon, Eastern Time. Good luck!

The stylish trees come in a variety of types, sizes and colors, including the “Candy Cane” tree, this week’s prize. And it‘s not just for Christmas: Put blue ornaments on the tree and can use it again for an Independence Day party.

The winner will receive a seven-foot-tall candy cane-colored tree and will enjoy this “sustainable” Christmas tree for many years to come.

Approximate Retail Value: $399.00

To see other designs, visit Treetopia.com.

• To Enter This Gourmet Giveaway: Go to the box at the bottom of our Gourmet Cookies, Cakes & Desserts Gift Ideas Page and click to enter your email address for the prize drawing. This contest closes on Monday, December 6th at noon, Eastern Time. Good luck!

A 7-foot-tall tree will be delivered right to your door! Photo courtesy Treetopia.

Start the event with a two glasses of
water. Photo by Fred Redhat | Dreamstime.

An article in a medical journal, recently reported by The New York Times, scientifically confirmed the efficacy of an old dieting trick:

Water drunk before meals helps to aid in weight loss, by filling the stomach so one is more full than ravenous.

Use this trick to minimize over-indulging on tempting food and drink this holiday season.

The first thing to do when you cross the threshold of a party, bar or restaurant is to imbibe two glasses of water: tap water, mineral water or club soda. (While not part of the study, we opine that you can substitute diet soda, iced tea/iced coffee or hot tea/coffee.)

If plain water doesn’t float your boat, go for flavored club soda or add a squeeze of lemon or lime, or a good shake of aromatic bitters, which aren’t bitter but add nice flavor and aroma. Angostura bitters, available in most supermarkets and liquor stores, have a nice ginger flavor; the company also makes orange bitters.

Club soda with bitters (lots of them!) are our favorite no-calorie mocktail. The four-ounce bottles of bitters are small enough to carry in a purse or pocket, so you can BYO.

The other benefit to starting a celebration with two glasses of water: It hydrates you to counter the dehydrating effect of alcohol.