Christmas gift ideas: give a pair

We were get­ting last-minute gro­cery for din­ner at Cold Stor­age Takashimaya when we saw out­side the cashier’s, a stall sell­ing Crescendo flavoured olive oils and aged bal­samic vinegars.

The company’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Sin­ga­pore has stalls like this all over town, but for some rea­son, we stopped for the first time, for a sampler.

Unlike many tem­po­rary stalls at depart­ment stores and super­mar­kets, this one was manned by a very knowl­edge­able young man called Pro­moter (seri­ously, why do they bother with name tags?) who very patiently paired as many com­bi­na­tions of flavoured oils and vine­gars for us to try.

We finally set­tled for a 100ml bot­tle of truffle-flavoured (not real truf­fle extract — we’re told the oils are merely flavoured by soak­ing white truf­fles in them) extra vir­gin olive oil and a 100ml bot­tle of 16 year old bal­samic vinegar.

They’re not exactly cheap (ok, I can’t remem­ber how much they were and I can’t find the receipt) — we had some at lunch but treated them as if they were some pre­cious potion of youth — but accom­pa­nied by a few drops of each, we had an absolutely gor­geous lunch of poached eggs and spinach and rocket salad with crusty bread this afternoon.

Some­thing else that got our atten­tion was the fact that the com­pany says you can bring your own glass bot­tles to buy your oils and vine­gar. In fact, it’ll be $6–8 cheaper if you do, because that’s what they charge for the glass bot­tles they sell.

Eco-friendly Christ­mas ven­dor, I thought. Until I saw the stack of plas­tic spoons pil­ing up in a lit­tle tray — used by the dozens of peo­ple sam­pling the offer­ings. Oh well.