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!
Favorite memory — Cooking the Christmas dinner for my family a few years ago for the first time. It was the first large dinner party I had cooked for (35 people) and I’ve been cooking dinners for large groups ever since!
My favorite memory was when my sisters and I were in elementary school and we heard a clatter on the roof top on Christmas morning. We ran to find my parents and they said Santa had just left. There was a note from Santa and he had eaten the cookies and drank the milk we left out. The reindeer had even eaten the carrots too!
My favorite holiday memory is making Christmas morning brunch with my sisters – being in the kitchen together with our parents, hearing Andy Williams Christmas playing in the background and drinking coffee as we created a meal for our extended family. I look forward to creating this memory each and every year.
Piling into the family van with snacks and hot cocoa and driving around to see Holiday lights!
I always loved Christmas Day after dinner. We would always take a nap after dinner, watch a movie or so, and then at about 6 or 7 pm all the aunts and uncles and cousins would come over to my parents house and we just had a ball. There were games to be played, food to be ate, a little alcohol to be taken, and it just went on until about 2 am. There were all ages there, from 2 to 75 and it was just so much fun.
When I was little, we often read from the Little House on the Prairie books. In them, Laura makes maple syrup candy with Ma and Mary. That’s what my mom, sister and I would do with the first good winter snow! We would get a large baking dish, fill it with the clean fallen snow and bring it inside. There, we would be boiling the maple syrup to just the right candy consistency. We didn’t have a candy thermometer so we compared how Laura described how the texture of the syrup should be in the books. When it seemed just right, we would pour long, thick strands on the snow. Some we would let harden like that. Others we would wrap around a fork when they were still pliable enough and then eat them right away like lollipops on the forks. When we got to make these, we knew we were officially in winter – it was one of my favorite days of the year and when the good snow came before Christmas, these candies welcomed in the holiday season in the best way for me.
My favorite memory, after all these years, was when I was a child. It was Christmas Eve and we were with family and friends. Like all Filipino families, we feasted. I remember running around with the other kids, being crazy. I was probably 5 or 6 years old. We went to midnight mass and upon our return, Santa ate our cookies and drank the milk we left him. On the wall was a handwritten letter from Santa on parchment paper. Written with calligraphy and all. I don’t remember what he wrote but when I recall that memory I can see the writing and looking up at that letter. It’s that moment you know that Santa is real. I want my son to experience the same thing but even better.
My favorite holiday memory is definitely Christmas 2014. My family road tripped from Philadelpia to Toronto and had a great time. As my brother and I are in our 20s, the holidays take on a very different feel. The trip to Toronto was one that we took many times as children so it was really nice to relive it with our parents as adults. 8 hours is much different as a 7 year old than as a 27 year old- that’s for sure! It was perfect, slightly snowy winter weather and driving through upstate NY was as picturesque as it could get. Stopping to get lunch at a cute lodge- complete with many taxidermies – was the icing on the cake.
We do a Chinese style Christmas dinner, so every year my extended family gathers in our cramped little house for hot pot! Imagine 30+ people smushed together in a small living room, all gathered around plates of raw meat,veggies, and fish! It feels like being in Hong Kong because of the density of people per square inch! But nothing says holidays more to me than being with my family, warmed to the core by love and fish balls :)
My favorite memory is the year before my Grandfather passed. It was the most beautiful Christmas eve ever. My grandma and grandpa on my moms side came out (they live in NJ and we live in central PA) and we had a big Christmas eve dinner. All sorts of food – crab cakes, seafood pasta, sausage and peppers, antipasto platter, etc. were had by all. Afterwards we opened our presents and played games until 3 am. I remember my grandpa dancing around the kitchen, kissing my grandma, and making us all laugh. I still look back and think about that as my favorite Christmas because it was so special, and after the fact we are able to look back on how amazingly beautiful it was as a final Christmas with my hero, my grandpa.