To celebrate our fifth anniversary, each week in 2007 we presented a brand new, handcrafted flavor. Each recipe was labored over, written out and tested with one or two (or three) test batches.

Most flavors were created using seasonal ingredients or seasonal themes. Others were inspired by holidays, events or contests. Most of the flavors came from the people here at Gelateria Naia who live each day with gelato. Others came from friends in the culinary world and a few were great suggestions from our guests.

How many did you manage to try?

Tired of lining up at the mall? Want to share something unique and Bay Area-y to friends not here? Friends like gelato?

Well for a limited time (two week) trial period we are trying out our online store, store.gelaterianaia.com. There you’ll find a convenient way to ship gelato or sorbetto to friends, family and associates! Alternately, you can also use the store to ship gift certificates for folks in the Bay Area as well.

It’s not too late to get that Naia gift! And for those procrastinators, we will let you know when your gift will be delivered in time for New Year’s rather than Christmas.

Gelateria Naia is proud to be supporting local Bay Area native Pim Techamuanvivit from food blog Chez Pim as she joins together the food blogosphere to support the World Food Programme with Menu for Hope.

We are giving away our very popular Dream Flavor. The winner will come up with their dream flavor and together we will create a great recipe, and Gelateria Naia will hand craft a batch of your Dream flavor just for you.

We have donated the Dream Flavor prize to several charities over the years and it has always proven to be very popular. Past Dream Flavor winners have requested a simple passion fruit sorbetto, a delicious Jim Beam bread pudding gelato, a chocolate dark & stormy gelato and our youngest winner created a lemon-banana with chocolate chip and cherries gelato (Hey, it’s Dream Flavor. That’s what she wanted.)

The Menu For Hope and the UN World Food Programme reminds us how fortunate we are. Here in the Bay Area we will send back our food if it is not perfect and demand that it be so. We will pick through a pile of fruit looking for just the right ripeness, discarding everything else. So please remember that others are going hungry and need our help.

If you are interested in helping out and having us make your dream flavor of gelato, here are the instructions:

1. Our dream gelato is prize code UW22. Visit the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope4 and make a donation. Click “Give Now!”

2. Every $10 you donate purchases a ticket, which you specify in the ‘Personal Message’ section of the donation form. So if you donate $50, write 5xUW22. If you donate $30, write 3xUW22. Don’t forget to leave your email address so they can contact you if you win.

The results will be published at Chez Pim on Wednesday January 9th.

When winter rolls around our choices for fresh fruit start to become a bit limited. The good news is that the fresh fruit we can get is among some of our most popular sorbetto flavors of the year. Cranberries, rhubarb and a huge variety of citrus make up just some of our winter offerings. The most popular flavor is by far, pomegranate.

The thing that makes our pomegranate sorbetto different from the others is that we don’t use juice from those funny shaped bottles. We use real pomegranates. If you have ever dug into a fresh pomegranate you know how they hate to let go of their seeds. We had tried every sort of method to speed up the process including juicing, pressing, picking, until my grandmother taught me an old trick. Sometimes finesse is better than strength.