Gift Basket Stores

This unique guide for homemade and heartfelt gifts offers recipes and ideas for creating special occasion baskets. Phillips signature dishes include Carrot Cake Mix, Sundried Tomato Pesto, Creole Seasoning, Simmering Potpourri, and Pecan Rice Mix. Includes clear instructions for preparing and using mixes, plus suggestions for packaging. Illustrated gift tags.

Customer Review: Expensive Ideas in inexpensive book. Not bad. Could be better.

`The Perfect Basket' crafting / cookbook by Diane Phillips is an inexpensive little book which offers a wide variety of imaginative giftgiving ideas which require very little crafting ability. You can be all thumbs with the glue gun and still be a winner with many of the projects in this book. It is almost overstating it to say these are `projects', as the hardest thing about many of the suggestions if finding some of the components.



While a basket is the container you always picture when you imagine gift collections (except me, whose all time greatest gift collection came in a plain cardboard box, giftwrapped, at Christmas when I was five years old) one of this book's major suggestions is in how to use a lot of different kinds of containers. My favorites are a `Radio Flyer' little red wagon and a slow cooker.



These two examples point up one important fact that along with the `easy to do' aspect of these collections goes the `not exactly cheap' caution. The author does us a great favor of giving us up to three different price levels, adding more and more expensive items to fit a more generous presentation. But, even the least expensive collections will rarely run less than 25 dollars and some of the high end collections can easily run to over 100 dollars.



And, the price level may vary widely if you are not careful or willing to choose less expensive, and therefore less impressive items. For example, the `Festival Italiano' $25 basket includes extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The problem is that a good `everyday' (Bertolli, Berio, Colavita) brand and size (1 Liter) of extra virgin olive oil can run to $15 and a good `everyday' brand of balsamic vinegar brand and size ((500 ml) can also run to over $10. Premium brands of both products can run to $50 a bottle, and if your recipient has high standards, a below-average brand will create a below-average impression. But this gets into knowing your recipient. My only point is that some of Ms. Phillips' collections can be expensive and they can be a lot more expensive than her suggested price. One place where the author specifically underquotes prices is in some of the containers. That little Radio Flyer wagon may only be available in pricy speciality stores and I am certain that a backpack `basket' from The North Face company will run to $50.



Another virtue of this book is the variety of occasions for which the author offers suggestions. And, almost all the collections are general enough so that tweaking them a bit one way or another will turn a `Picnic Basket' into a housewarming basket or a Memorial Day or Labor Day or 4th of July gathering basket.



The book is divided into a larger section of `Special Occasion Baskets' which involve no cookery and `Food Baskets' where the centerpiece is one or more homemade mixes for baking or assembling cookies, breads, muffins, chili, tea, lemonade, scones, salads, salsas, pancakes, popovers, or you name it! Recipes for these goodies actually require practically no cooking skills. The most important skill is the sense to buy a really good set of measuring tools (and know how to use them) and secure glass containers in which to put the goods. The recipes all have two parts. The first part, which is generally very simple matter of measuring and mixing either all wet or all dry ingredients, is for the gift giver. The second part, presented on pictures of little index cards, is for the recipient, and it is up to the gift giver to transfer this recipe to a card and place it in the basket with the ingredients. I think the author really missed some good opportunities here. The very easiest way to transfer these `end user' recipes to the basket would be to scan them into a computer and print them on card stock, but the author gives no clue to how this can be done. I am not expecting a cooking specialist to also be an expert Kinkos operative, but a mention of this technique and some guidance would have gone a long way. Another suggestion would have been for the author to offer all these recipe cards on images on an internet site which could be downloaded and printed.



On perishables in general, the author offers excellent warnings to the gift giver to on what to tell the recipient about the shelf life of the mixtures.



The book opens with a nice section of general tips on assembling baskets. This includes the tip which always rubs me the wrong way, about being sure to pack the basket with raffia, shredded paper, or plastic to bulk up the appearance of the goodies. It seems to me that a superior method is to provide candy, hand towels, or shop towels as filler. That is, bulk up with something which is useful.



I'm sure there was some issue with publisher Harvard Common Press on keeping the book down to an easily marketable price, but I think a picture of each and every basket would have been a good thing here. I rarely feel the need for pictures for food recipes, but here, the presentation is the whole game. I don't know what the legal issues are here, but it would have been a very clever way to present recommended brands without mentioning them in the text. The quality of the pictures which are given give a small taste of what could have been done with a picture for every basket.



While I have not reviewed any other books on doing gift baskets, I sense that this volume is excellent for the price, but it could have been a bit better. The very test thing that even without the pics, the suggestions are imaginative and inspiring.







Customer Review: Not good!

I wished I had read the previous reviews before I jumped to buy this book. Unless you really know about gift baskets before you read this book, it's not very helpful or clear.
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