Made here in Denver, these Bloody Mary mixes from The Real Dill are the best we've ever tasted and the best you'll ever taste. As you can see from the image, the Bloody Mary Mix on the left (the original) is on fire with cucumbers and tomatoes, along with garlic and some pungent spices, while the Bloody Mary Mix in the center is on fire with actual fire. That one is the new extra spicy version. The original mix already has a satisfying spicy zing to it; the extra spicy is "packed with extra habaneros and serranos" (as the label says) and has a lingering burn that seems to accumulate as you drink more. Give someone the gift of a Denver Bloody Mary.

The Real Dill Bloody Mary Mix
Friends & Family: $11.99/quart
(reg. $12.99)

The Real Dill Extra Spicy Bloody Mary Mix
$12.99/quart

The Real Dill Bloody Mary Mix Growler
$24.99/64 oz

Located in Denver, Novo Coffee builds long-term, meaningful partnerships with producers and coffee farmers so they can purchase from the same farms year after year, which helps to improve farmers' pricing and enhances the quality of the coffee. Holiday Blend is rich with notes of candied pecan, cranberry, and fudge. Novo recommends pairing Holiday Blend "with the people in your life that you love the most, home-cooked holiday meals, and making new holiday memories."

Novo Holiday Blend
$18.99/12 oz

Also located in Denver, Oso Rojo Hot Sauce's goal is to create hot sauces that exhibit flavor before spice, but not at the expense of the spice.
• Habanero Mustard (spice level:hot) features mustard infused with an habanero-ginger-garlic triumvirate to create a mustard that is anything but average; use on everything you already put mustard on.
• Umami Bomb (spice level: mild to medium) combines roasted vegetables, dried chiles, dried mushrooms, and tamari for a depth of flavor similar to a mole sauce. Use it instead of BBQ or steak sauces for an extra kick.
• The Peach Phantom has peach, basil, and {dun dun dunnnn} ghost peppers to give this sauce a perfect balance of sweet and heat.
• Jalapeño Garlic has a huge, bold, smokey flavor that features jalapeños, green chiles, and onions that were grilled over oak and mesquite.

Habanero Mustard, Umami Bomb, and Jalapeño Garlic
$7.99/ea (4 oz)

The Peach Phantom
$8.99/ea (4 oz)

We hired stick figures to model our t-shirts, and we couldn't be happier with how they wore them. Marczyk Fine Foods t-shirts make an excellent gift.

Let's say that you are at your kid's (or kids') soccer game and you befriend a really cool couple. You well might assume that once you meet these parents' offspring that the children would share some of their elders' awesomeness. That's often the case.

For a while now, Marczyk Fine Foods is one of a few grocers in the United States to carry an exceptionally delicious, jarred tomato from Masseria Mirogallo in Basilicata, the "instep" to the Italian Boot.

I've been cooking with the three renditions of these tomatoes for a few years now — the whole peeled, the sliced (called "spaccatelle") and a delicious "passata" or purée — and they blow out of the stockpot any canned tomato that I've ever used, even pricier versions. And they contain none of the preservative called calcium chloride that's used in many canned (especially cut up) tomatoes.

(Calcium chloride isn't dangerous at all, but it firms up the cell walls of the tomato and, hence, keeps the canned mash from becoming mushy. But it keeps doing that even when the canned tomatoes are cooked, interfering with the breakdown of the tomatoes into a sauce-like form. If you want smooth, go for processed tomatoes free of forms of calcium, such as Masseria Mirogallo's.)

So, when I learned that Marczyk's was going to be bringing in a large range of antipasti fixings, preserves, pickles, spreads, pastes, and a couple of tomato-based foods, all small-batch and handmade by Masseria Mirogallo, I was eager to see if "the kids" were as cool as "the ‘rents."

They are. Way so.

A combination of factors collaborates to make this so: a 70-acre farm of exceptionally fecund earth that has been worked by the same family since the 1800s and a strictly minimalist manner of preserving the fruits of that land. (For example, each tomato in the "whole peeled" version is skinned and packed into its jar by hand — in this mechanized day, think of that! — with no more than a smidge of added salt.)

The fruit jams from Masseria Mirogallo are all sweet-ripe fruit with a whisper of added sugars. The farm makes its many pickles and pastes using merely what vegetables are given it by the land, perhaps quickly blanching one in white vinegar, straining it, then topping its pieces with the farm's extra virgin olive oil, perhaps cooking down peppers or artichoke hearts with little more than lemon juice and salt, then whipping the mass into a meltingly smooth, thick cream.

I experimented with all the Masseria Mirogallo foods that are new to Marczyk Fine Foods, just to offer some ideas on how you, too, could get acquainted with these marvelous children. For example: to see how a sweet jam plays with the powerful funk of a super-strong cheese (or, correlatively, how a piquant, somewhat tart paste does the same).

Or to see how crumbles of a uniquely twice-cooked dried pepper will spark, like adult Smarties or SweeTarts, a laid-back bisque in sore need of them. Or to see how tired leftovers can be "lifted" by the vibrancy of a sweet-hot pepper jam. Or to see how truly the hottest chile pepper that I've ever tasted can play up the earthy flavors and rough textures of a smattering of different olives.

You get the idea: these are the sorts of kids a hungry adult doesn't mind at the table.