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 have several favorite holiday memories, but they all have a theme. Food and family. My relatives (including me) would get together and have our traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner. Bacala (fried cod fish), along with the bacala in tomato sauce that we would pour over pasta, anchovie and bread crumbs saute’d in a little olive oil (the anchovies were cut up and you couldn’t really tell they were in there) and that topping poured over pasta (there was a specific type of pasta for each of these toppings). My Grandfather would pour a little red wine into our milk glasses when we weren’t looking (which of course ruined our milk–yuck!). There was fried bread dough, cannoli, candy from Italy, Italian cookies, cooked broccoli that was saute’d in olive oil and garlic, cooked cauliflower that was saute’d in olive oil and garlic, chunks of sweet anice for people to eat, salad made with olives and just olive oil and garlic for the dressing–in essance a ton of delicious food and plenty of love to go around. Afterwards, while the women cleaned up, the men would have fruit in their wine and talk or play cards. When clean up was done, then the music would start. There was dancing, furnature was moved to the sides of the room, carpets taken up and I would get to dance the tarrentella with my Grandfather. Ah, the memories make me want to cry, I miss them so. Bittersweet. We would then open presents and then off to midnight mass and home to bed. I still make all the traditional foods from my childhood, minus the red wine in the milk. YUCK!
One Christmas we traveled to our aunt’s rural home in Oklahoma. It was that unusual Christmas when everyone could be there, so we had a houseful. Our aunt, who unfortunately was not a cook, decided to try roasting the turkey in a paper bag. Flames were soon licking the ceiling, and we were just short of calling the fire department before the fire was put out. The fun part was that we all had a great laugh enjoying each other more than ever and ate all the potluck sides we could without missing the turkey.
Since Hanuka was the holiday of choice for us i remember one time my mom was making homeade Sufganiot (the Hanuka donut thingie). We’d bern on ourbest behavior all day waiting for those pillowy puffs dusted in powdered sugar. My mom isn’t the best cook when it comes to a anything doughy but made the effort to make us happy. After along anticipated wait she pulled them out of the oil, dusted with the sugar and we all feastively lit the Menora and sang songs. Not to mention reached for a fresh sufgania. We all had the exact same face when we sunk our teeth into it: “oh sh#$%, what now?”. It was burned on the inside and raw in the middle and we gulped it down…to make her happy.
When I was little we would go to my grandfathers house in a small crowd and eat Manicotti every year. When I was about 12 years old we spent Christmas with my cousin, an excellent cook with the largest kitchen I had ever seen and he began to teach me how to cook that day. Among the unbelievable spread of food was king crab legs, stuffed artichokes, my great aunts meatballs, pasta, and antipasto, and filet mignon… It was the most I had ever eaten!
One of my favorite holiday memories is my mom opening up a gift she bought herself. She and my dad usually buy Christmas gifts for the family together, and that year she’d pointed out to him what she wanted. So, they wrapped it up and put it under the tree. When she opened it she made the best fake surprise face to rival any real surprise face.
My favorite holiday memory is going to my grandfather and uncle’s on Christmas Eve. They hung our stockings up in the bedroom we stayed in as kids, aptly titled “the kids room” and we would each run in the room the second we got to their house and tear through them. Next my uncle would make his famous cream of tomato soup and we would eat that as a prelude to Christmas Eve dinner. Which was usually prime rib sandwiches with *gasp* Cheez wiz on them. Then we would open up our presents and play games together for hours. Such special family time that I truly miss now that we are all older.
My favorite holiday memory is Sister Cookie Baking Day. My 2 sisters and I take a weekday off right before Christmas and spend the entire day blasting Christmas music and baking dozens and dozens of cookies together. I buy us each a pair of cozy socks every year for the occasion and we always watch Love Actually and Little Women during the day while we bake. It is one of my favorite days of the year.
My favorite memory is making and decorating sugar cookies with my mom when I was a child. In retrospect, I know they looked horrible, but we had such fun “decorating” them.
Ooh, the one Christmas it snowed when I was little! Getting up at 5am, waking up my very irritated parents, and opening presents before going sledding and coming inside to hot chocolate…and a full Chinese breakfast, congee and all. The next year my parents were not so amenable and refused to get out of bed so we ended up eating bananas while opening presents at noon.
My favorite memory is my mom baking lots and lots of cinnamon bread to give to neighbors and family. The house smelled so good. And my mom would cut really thick slices for us! I really miss her.