It’s giveaway time! It’s a massive one guys and I’m pretty excited! For the past week or so I’ve been featuring recipes using Staub, Shun, Cuttingboard.com, Finex, and Kitchen Aid and now’s the time to finally bundle everything up and give it all away. Well, not literally, because you’re actually going to win new items, so there’s no real bundling, just figurative bundling.
win this staub!
I hope you’ve been following along – so far I’ve made Slow Braised Japanese Chashu Pork, Mini Puff Pastry Roses, Caramel Corn and Rice Krispie Mix, and Mint Snowman Marshmallows, but with these giveaway items you can make pretty much anything, which is perfect for the holiday season.
win this shun knife and cuttingboard.com boo’s block!
I love food – as I’m sure you know – and one of my favorite Christmas memories is of me, my brother, and Christmas chocolates. As little kids, come the first of December, we would get chocolate advent calendars. I still see them around now: those thin cardboard drugstore boxes featuring a Christmas picture with tiny numbered windows and chocolates hiding behind them. My brother and I lived for that moment at the end of the day when we got to pry open the cardboard for our long awaited treat. Our eager fingers would melt the chocolate ever so slightly as we tried to eat our chocolates as slowly as possible.
win this finex cast iron pan!
One year, we got it in our heads that we didn’t want to wait. We snuck our calendars down to the basement – it was cold and dark down there and I didn’t like it but my brother convinced me it was the best place to hide – and ate every single chocolate. We ate the entire month of December. And the thing is, we did it in a gentle, artful way where we could close back the windows so that at a casual glance, you couldn’t tell that the calendar was ravaged.
win this kitchen aid!
Maybe it was the sugar-high making us crazy, but we totally thought we got away with it. That is, until it was time for our nightly ritual with our parents. Needless to say, there was no chocolate treat that night. Or the next night, or the next. But, it was okay, because come Christmas morning, there were still presents under the tree. Apparently, our chocolate binge didn’t leave us on Santa’s naughty list, which was a huge relief, because, presents.
These days I’m more into giving than receiving so I couldn’t resist putting together this giveaway for you! I wish I could send everyone a Christmas present but since I can’t, I thought I’d do the next best thing and giveaway some of my favorite things. So, let me know your favorite holiday memory and maybe you’ll be the lucky reader who wins! Good luck!
Giveaway: I’ve teamed up with some of my favorite brands to do a massive giveaway. One lucky reader will win:
Staub 4 Quart Round Cocotte
Shun 6-inch Dual Core Utility Knife
Cuttingboard.com Boos Block Walnut 20×15 Cutting Board
Finex 10-inch Cast Iron Pan
Kitchen Aid Artisan Design Series 5-Quart Stand Mixer w/Glass Bowl in Pearl Silver
To enter: Leave a comment on the blog with your favorite winter holiday memory. I want to hear ALL the details! I’ll randomly choose a winner and notify them through email. Open to US residents only. (Sorry international friends, only American companies agreed to this one!) If you’d like some extra entries use the widget below to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Contest ends December 21st at 12pm PST. Good luck!
The giveaway is closed! I’ll be announcing the winner in the next week or so after reading through all of the comments. Thank you everyone who entered! There are some beautiful memories here!
Update: Congrats Chelsea, you won! Look for an email from me shortly!
cooking a big chanuka feast with my family!
Well, I grew up not celebrating holidays but I remember sledding parties fondly in the winter in Deadwood, SD. A far cry from the gunslinging past of the town but what a wonderful place to grow up!
My favourite winter holiday memory is of my first white Christmas. I’m from Sydney, Australia, so my Christmas has always consisted of scorching sunshine, seafood, and afternoon swims at the beach. But my first white Christmas was in New York in 2013. We arrived at my boyfriend’s grandparent’s huge, white house in Westchester. The entire yard, which is full of trees, was covered in glistening snow. We baked pies and drank mulled wine in front of the wood burning stove. We went for a stroll in the snow-covered woods after lunch. It was the first time I’d had a white Christmas, and it was magical.
My favorite part of Christmas is cooking in my pajamas for my family. I make a filet stuffed with lobster and we drink champagne in our pjs. It’s the only holiday that I get to cook for, so I make the most of it. On Christmas Eve I cook Daniel Bouluds red wine braised short ribs. It’s always a hit.
When I was little, we always celebrated Christmas at our cabin in northern Minnesota. It is a traditional log cabin which my dad and grandpa built, has no indoor plumbing (only an outhouse!), and one small stove that heats the entire place. My grandpa would start a fire in the stove three days before my family was going to arrive, just to make sure it was warm enough. But the real kicker is using an outhouse in December… we would literally have to scrape off ice from the seats and hope our butts wouldn’t freeze!
My sisters and I would bake all kinds of cookies with grandma. And grandpa would hook up the toboggan behind the snowmobile and pull us all over the frozen lake. It was truly a winter wonderland!
xo, Ellie
Hungry by Nature
Eek! This is so exciting, Steph!
My favorite holiday memory centers around, of course, food! Christmas Eve has always been the biggest day in our home – we plate hundreds of beautiful Christmas cookies for our neighbors and deliver them, prep our cinnamon buns for Christmas morning, and make a heaping tray of two strombolis to enjoy Christmas Eve night while we watch a Christmas movie. Our movie selection varies now, but when we were younger, it was always a Muppet Christmas (and I stand by it being one of the best Christmas flicks to this day). Waking up to the smell of homemade cinnamon bun deliciousness on Christmas morning is one of the best presents ever!
Happy Holidays!
Once, when I was about six years old, my family was poor around Christmas and we were struggling. My parents didn’t talk too much about it, but as a child you overhear some and my parents had a discussion with me about how we weren’t going to afford to do a tree this year, but that Santa knew and he would still come and not to worry. My father was a preacher at the time, and I remember just a couple days before Xmas we were coming home from church and when we got there, all the lights in the house were on. We were confused but I squealed, “Santa!” Sure enough there were huge boot tracks leading up to the house in the snow. Inside, there was a tree all decorated and lit with ornaments and a few presents underneath. I lost my six-year-old mind. We discovered later that another poor family from the community had gifted us the Christmas tree and put it up while we were gone. It’s my most cherished memory of giving, and I hope to do the same for someone else someday. <3
My favorite Christmas memory is waking up and eating oysters Baltimore with my family! After opening stockings of course…
My favorite winter holiday is Christmas! I enjoy seeing family and friends, eating festive and delicious food! And of course relaxing at home, watching Christmas movies.
I think my favorite winter memory might be the few years I had as a kid where my Arizona cousins would come to visit for a few weeks to hit the slopes. There were 6 of them and it was an absolute blast to have extra kids in the house. We’d spend lots of time playing in the 3ft deep snow all around my house (the perks of living on a mountain!). We’d dig out snow caves and go sledding on the hill a few houses down. At night we’d play in the basement, us younger kids being relentlessly teased by the older cousins. It’s a memory I hold very dear because as we aged, we grew apart and many of us chose different paths in life.