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!
My favorite memory was the holiday rush of working as a pastry chef! Work was always crazy busy (but the paycheck made it manageable), and I was in college, too, so exams were at the same time. I loved coming home on christmas eve night and finally getting to BREATHE! But I loved the crazy rush!
My favorite holiday memory is when my husband and I would go to visit my mother at Christmas. Each year we would make her a new and different gingerbread house. She would laugh with us as we tried to figure out the best approach to stabilizing the walls and roof, and how to decorate the house, without having my husband sneak off with some of his favorite pieces of candy. She loved each house so much, that she would not part with them until they collapsed.
It’s a strange thing trying to pinpoint one perfect memory. Rather than one memory standing out there is a collection of favorite moments including being in a position to finally surprise my parents with gifts they truly appreciated and wanted and seeing their excitement. The winter I fell in love with my significant other and we held hands in on snowy winter nights. The collection of moments include a friend surprising me with mugs she had tracked down after I had admired them in a coffee shop with her, the hat he crocheted for me our first holiday together, the joy in my niece’s eyes has she enjoyed the lights, sparkle and presents of the season. I remember twirling in holiday skirts and sharing cocktails and stories with friends and feeling warmth and gratitude in spite of the cold of winter.
No one invites the bone-chilling winds of December. No one strips off their heavy-duty jackets in the middle of December. No one sits outside in the teeth-battering wind when there are heated homes to go in. But I do. I do all those things. Not because I enjoy being in the cold; I hate it. I’m probably the biggest scaredy-cat when it comes to the cold you’ll ever know. Yet I do all of the above voluntarily, willingly, happily. I am able to sit outside on a bench overtaken by frost because… I’m never alone. I love the holidays because I’m always surrounded by all these people who love me, the true me. All too often I find myself pretending to be someone I’m not, at school, at volunteering events, anywhere. Yet, when the holiday time comes (and with it all these family members that probably remember me more than I do them), I can be myself. Christmas is the only holiday where I can spend at least two weeks just reposing with my family, not having to care about appearances or my clumsy personality. My family loves all of me with their hearts. So now comes my favorite memory: In a room full of close relatives, distant relatives, even non-relatives, we were eating. Dinner. Now, as the wonderful gluts we were, we ate hot pot and a whole bunch of other dishes that just made my eyes water for my mouth. There were spicy noodles, red to the soul with fatty meats just delicately blanketing the dish, grilled chicken, burned just every so slightly so that it had a nice “CRUNCH!”, and ahhh the dessert. Ice cream mochi. I think that’s self-explanatory. Now in this room full of eye-witnesses and delicious food, I stepped away from the table in an attempt to go to the restroom (I may have drank too much water… those spicy noodles were HOT) aaaand “it” happened. I tripped and grabbed onto the table as quick as I could, my hand going straight into the hot pot (which extremely fortunate for me, was turned off a while ago, thus it wasn’t scorching hot). Oops. Not only did we have to apologize to the people who were near my incident (they just loved the hot pot so much their faces decided to bathe in the soup), we had to apologize to the restaurant manager, for I had broken the hot pot bowl… in half… It was probably the most embarrassing Christmas party ever, but at the same time, it was the most fun. Our table could not stop laughing. Instead of being bitter and ashamed, I was pretty ecstatic that I brought so much joy to our table of close relatives, distant relatives, and even the non-relatives. I didn’t have to hang my head on the noose (just kidding) and was instead pretty proud of having such a clumsy personality, or I mean, who else would have made my table so euphoric (and admittedly a little bit of a cacophony)?
Last year, my husband and I were living in Austin, TX– far away from family and friends. I wasn’t really looking forward to Christmastime, as we were feeling kind of lonely. But Zach inspired me to come out of my shell and celebrate– we bought a tree and decked it out, took a Christmas picture and sent cards to all of our friends and family, telling them how much we missed them, made cookies for our neighbors and coworkers, and went all-out with stocking stuffers! We had so much fun together and grew so much closer because we had to rely on each other, and it ended up being one of my best Christmases ever.
My favorite holiday memory is when my Dad got my sister and I a new puppy and kitten for Christmas. We were young back then, only 10 and 5 and with the resent divorce between my parents things were tough. Our Mom didn’t want pets so we begged and begged our dad for months for a pet. I still remember going over to my Dad’s Christmas Day and walking up to the front steps. It just snowed the night before and we saw paw prints leading up to the door way. We gasped, holding our breath as we opened the door into the house… could it be true!? Our new puppy and kitten greeted us with the most exciting welcoming we have ever received. That was a great Christmas!
I have two favorite holiday memories that happened in the winter months….
I was a little girl and I was baking cookies with my grandmother before she died, they were Christmas cutouts cookies. that Christmas I got a mixer and a recipe book with all the recipes for my family pass down for generations. I still make the recipes in the book today. The book Is old and pages are torn but it’s probably my most cherished possession. I actually keep it in the fire safe that I have in my home and take it out when I’m doing my holiday baking and cooking.
Another memory is when my family and I went to go cut down our Christmas tree and it was the middle of nowhere and we had a permit to get our first Christmas tree out in the middle of nowhere and he found this beautiful tree that was about 7 feet tall. The road together was being crazy and we had a rock and have a tire totally completely destroyed. We were lucky that we had cell phone service and AAA but they wouldn’t be there for 2 to 3 hours at least. Luckily my mom Paxton’s Noxon and we actually had a good time sitting in the car singing Christmas carols and it was actually wonderful given our situation.
My father gave us such wonderful Christmases. I was thanking him out loud today, even though he died in 2014. One year when I was five I picked some soap that I thought he would love and I was very excited to give it to him. There is a wonderful photo of me looking up at him excitedly, while he pretended to be very happy with the bar of soap. I feel blessed that he made Christmas such a wonderful time of year for me. While it is hard, I know he would want me to keep enjoying it even though he is gone. Thank you for encouraging me to remember this time with him.
My favorite memories of home are at the holidays. Christmas, even though not financed with limitless money, was limitless in food, love and laughter. My mom made
special candies,cookies and Christmas goodies that are still a family tradition even though Mother and Daddy aren’t with is any more. Their love still is a wonderful memory.
making Christmas dinner with my mom. Always a hodgepodge of Chinese, Vietnamese, and American food!