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!
I had family in the hospital one christmas, a hospital that was a 3 1/2 hour drive from home. So instead of having Christmas at our house with all of the cousins, like we usually did, we went to my cousins house (which was much closer to the hospital).
Now, we usually hung out stockings above my fireplace, but my cousins didn’t have one. So we scrounged together some cardboard and made a makeshift one. Come Christmas eve, I drove down to the hospital and picked up my family member, bringing them home so they could spend the night and Christmas day with the rest of the family.
My favorite memories are all around the kids table. I laughed so hard every single year. My cousins are all hilarious and we rarely all got together so it was never a bad thing to sit there. We’d always get the giggles bc my grandma wanted perfection and our family never could quite get it together
My favorite holiday memory has always been taking the train down into Chicago with my family to see Santa and all of the amazing decorated windows on Michigan Avenue and State Street. We have pictures of my family and I with Santa every year since I was two! Now we get to take my niece and nephew and hand the tradition down to a new generation! It’s a really fun activity, and now that I don’t live near my family, I treasure it that much more!
My favorite holiday memory was drinking eggnog with my grandpa on Christmas Eve. We didn’t have much but I loved him more then any amount of money could buy.
My favorite holiday memory is a tradition that my parents started when my siblings and I were little. Every Christmas Eve, we would be given a new pair of holiday pajamas. It was something I always looked forward to, so much so that I got upset when I became a teenager and my parents stopped doing it. I almost forced my mom to reinstate the tradition and now, at 19, I am the only one out of me and my two siblings that still gets a pair of Christmas pajamas. It makes the holiday that much more special!
My favorite winter holiday memory is dancing in the Nutcracker every year while I was growing up.
As my birthday is close to Christmas, my parents would let me pick half of my presents to open on my birthday and the rest would wait until Christmas morning. One year I picked a box on my birthday that had a Gamecube inside of it. I was thrilled, but I didn’t end up picking any presents that had Gamecube games in them. So the system sat in my room, all perfectly positioned and ready to go come Christmas. Christmas Eve rolls around and my parents say that my brother and I can open one gift, and my dad hands me a specific one. It was Super Monkey Ball. For once we didn’t beg my parents unceasingly to wake up, the next morning we happily played the game together for hours until my parents woke up to open the rest of the presents with us. Definitely one of the times we got a long swimmingly, they were few and far between.
My favorite holiday memory graced me with it’s presence during a time I least expected it. A few years ago around this time, I was going through a pretty rough breakup. Like, a rug being pulled from underneath your lusty toes kind of breakup. Heart. Ache. [Ladies, ya feel me?] And while my world was spinning, the person who I always turned to during hard times, my older sister & best friend, was thousands of miles away backpacking South America. With the thought of spending the holidays at home in Wisconsin and my misery lurking around every corner, I did what any temporarily insane broken hearted gal would do; “One round trip ticket to Ecuador, please!”
Okay, okay .. here comes the holiday cheer :)
Alas! I landed in Quito, Ecuador and was in my sister’s embrace. She and Juan Martin, a friend she had met earlier in Argentina, who was gracious enough to host us in Quito, poured us three Fernet and coca colas and we toasted to what ended up being one of the most euphoric experiences of my life.
Finally seeing my sister was joyful enough but the real magic came after Juan took us to the city of Banos for the weekend, when we befriended two fellow travelers; Natalie from Sweden and Peter from Australia. They were staying at the same hostel and the energy between us was incredible. So much that they both traveled back to Quito with us, where my sister and I planned to cook them, along with Juan and his family, a traditional American holiday dinner.
The menu? A turkey, potatoes, vegetables and gravy. The problem? Turkeys are not an easy find in Ecuador, so much that both Juan and his family had never eaten it before. After visiting not one, not two but THREE grocery stores, we finally found our pavo (Spanish for turkey). This thing was massive! And frozen to the core. So we spent the next day thawing it out in a bathtub, with jacuzzi jets, each of us taking a turn flipping it over and changing the water.
The next morning, we awoke to a perfectly thawed turkey. After a hilarious sigh of relief, we all began preparing our much anticipated American feast. That was until we realized that the turkey was bigger than the oven itself. Yep. Road block. With a lot more laughter and little macgyver action, we managed to get fit the bird inside and continued on our culinary quest. A few hours later, we all sat down around the dining room table, smiles hanging from our ears, in front of a beautiful display of food.
Funny enough, it ended up being the most delicious turkey we’d ever had (shout out to Tom Colicchio for the recipe!) – and easily became the best story to tell this time of year. It went from being the worst holiday to date to the funniest, most exhilarating celebration surrounded by new friends, a loving family, my beautiful sister and one handsome bird.
Ps: Steph, email me if you want to see some funny pictures of this going down. Naturally, we documented the whole thing. ;)
Every year, my high school would organize an ice skating event at Wollman Rink in Central Park. My first year was also my first time ice skating ever. I was terrified of falling and making a complete fool of myself. And on top of this, my best friend (who had skated all her life) told me horror stories of falling down and having someone run over your hands at full speed with their ice skates! My first hour at the rink, I was glued on to the sides of the rink and nobody could convince me to try letting go. Then, my friends all came and pried me off the wall and I ended up having a really great time. I definitely fell down a whole lot, but I had such a great time.
My favorite holiday memory is definitely playing our family games. Every year we share so much laughter. Just silly fun! And I love the holiday meals too. So many new memories and new recipes could be made with these amazing giveaways. Thanks for your wonderful blog!