Give the Gift of Cooking with Gift Cards

As you start to think about your holiday gift list, you may be overwhelmed trying to come up the perfect present. Maybe you know someone's favorite store, but have no idea what to pick out within it. Cologne? New set of headphones? A shirt with a cat on it playing Halo?

Face it, holiday gifts are hard, and sometimes picking the right ones can be more stressful than you expected. One way to combat this: stalk their Pinterest account until you find a post they pin that you can feasibly acquire. Problems with this? Well, for one thing, guys don’t Pin. Disappointingly, you’d probably find all that person’s pins involve pictures of cheesy bread and puppies. Lastly, it's a little stalker-ish.

So, what's the answer? Gift cards!

There may be a teeny tiny part of you that feels like an impersonal schmutz for settling on a gift card. First of all, don’t worry, you’re not a schumtz. I personally appreciate the freedom that comes from receiving a gift card. It saves me the guilt I feel as I’m standing in the Customer Service line holding the gift I’m about to return because a family member thought I’d wear pink leggings….with sparkles. Gift cards are totally great gifts, but you can make them even better. There’s a way to add an air of freshness to the gift while also making it more personal to the receiver. The trick: give them the gift of an experience.

What do I mean by gifting an experience? It might sound cliché, but it’s basically a way to tie up a future bundle of memories with a big red bow. Need an idea for a gift? Ask yourself these questions:

• Does your recipient like to travel?
• Do they enjoy learning and having a blast at the same time?
• Do they love food and everything about it?
• What if you could send them to Paris for the night, and have them learn how to make an incredibly authentic Coq au Vin? Or maybe they’d prefer traveling to Spain, where they’ll whip up some tapas and a mouth-watering Paella.

To give someone a gift card to The Chopping Block is to give them a plane ticket to go to any culinary destination they want for the night. Gifts like these allow the receiver to escape for a few hours, learn something new, and gain some confidence in the kitchen while doing it. Rather than providing someone a gift card to purchase tangible items (which they can also do), give them a reason to nostalgically smile as they’re preparing a meal in their own home years later.

As a Class Assistant whose dicing and slicing skills were once nothing to be admired, I can personally say that our Knife Skills classes create a wonderful baseline of knowledge… not to mention they help you reduce the time you spend on meal preparation. It is also our least expensive class, priced at just $40 for 2.5 hours of everything you need to know about which knives to use for the job and tricks to cutting tricky foods (ahem... onions).

Whether you decide on tickets to go indoor-skydiving, a spot in a BYOB painting class, or perhaps decide to join us here for a delicious night of cooking, make this holiday season’s gifting a wonderful excuse to impart an enjoyable experience…and perhaps one that doesn’t end up at the Customer Service counter of a department store.