Andrew Coppolino's picks for food-themed Christmas gifts

If you feel that time is running out for holiday shopping for the food lover, home cook or culinary aficionado on your list, here are a few suggestions to motivate you. Kitchen gadgets are fun to shop for and give to friends and family and you may want to buy one for yourself and stick it under the tree.

Just a note: most gifts listed below are available in Canada.Others can be purchased online andothers yet are part of Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns.

Less expensive

Relish Cooking Studio in Waterloo and Casual Gourmet in Guelph agree that the vegetable "spiralizer" seems to be a hot gift this year. Think: giant pencil sharpener. Affix a carrot, zucchini or potato, crank the mechanism and you've got cucumber spaghetti ribbons or curly French fries. Prices can start as low as $20, but don't go too cheap: I imagine a Russet potato might require some torque.

Engraved or embossed rolling pins will let the kids bake up some nicely designed cookies. Themes include animals, Halloween, Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, but maybe with the geometric pattern the kids can finally learn what a parallelogram is. Starting at $20.

Spices like Portuguese peri peri(or piri piri) and Middle East za'atar and sumac have become popular. Better food stores carry the items, $7-$10. Also available at Relish, the Waterloo Backyard Honey Co. makes a local honey infused with lemon. The combination cuts out a step for your favourite tea-totaller.

The kick of the Moscow Mule came about in the 1940s, a marketing scheme by our comrades at Smirnoff. The drink was vodka (duh), lime or lemon juice and ginger beer. It was served in a copper mug, but the Casual Gourmet, who say their home bar section has been quite busy this fall, has a double-walled glass mug for $30to keep things hot and cold when they are supposed to be. It's like Siberia and the tropics of Sochi in one.

That little pop-up button in the turkey is so old school. Instead, go with an instant read thermometer to look like a pro cook: the small electronic device can gauge food temperature in mere seconds instead of the minutes a classic meat thermometer requires. Kitchener's STOP Restaurant Supply has a good selection, starting at $20.

Moderately expensive

I'm itching to get a pressure cooker: saving time and energy, they cook quickly by boiling a liquid inside a locked chamber. The trapped steam increases internal pressure in the food and cooks it more quickly. Look for them at department stores and hardware stores, starting at $70.

Where there is Swiss fondue, there is also raclette. It's a Swiss cow's milk cheese, but it is also a small electric grill that melts the raclette and you slide it off on to the plate. The Swiss, it seems, really know how to party with melted cheese. Look for raclettes at Hudson's Bay, Costco and Stokes stores, from $100-$160.

More and more, cooking is becoming connected to smartphones. The DROP kitchen scale and recipe app helps you with measurements on a scale that is connected wirelessly to an iPad, which can also show you videos of techniques. They say it's selling like hotcakes (the cooking method for which you can probably search on the device; online $100-$150.

I want one of these too. The Anova Precision Cooker is a digital cooking device that slips onto the side of a big saucepan full of water and heats it. You put your New York strip loin in a food-grade Ziploc plastic bag, submerge it in the water and program your phone. Then, when you're stuck in traffic at5:30, you can relax knowing you're really a sous vide commuter.

A little more expensive

Manipulating grains may be of interest to someone on your list: bread and beer. The Fourneau Bread Oven sells for about $250 andis a cast iron dome that looks like a mini Quonset hut. It heats up in your oven into which you slide a bread dough to bake. It's an oven in an oven.

If you like your grains in liquid form, there's the PicoBrew Zymatic counter-top brewer. The world's first, apparently, it's an all-grain, fully-automatic, counter-top beer brewing appliance that brews beer directly to a 9-litre keg. Does that make it the Keurig of beer? At $500 a pop, I doubt it.

A final silly purchase could be the Toasteroid: the world's first app-controlled smart-image toaster. This nexus of Wonderbread, micro-filaments and smartphone allows you to program the toaster to toast bread with images, faces, reminder notes and the day's weather report. Now, what is the emoji for "what is the point of this, and do I really want my breakfast to be reminding me that it's going to be snowing and sub-zero temperatures?