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 Christmas memory goes back to one of the first Christmases my family spent together after years of my dad not talking to his siblings. There was a family feud that I was unaware of as a small child, but for years, it kept me away from my aunts, uncles and cousins. Finally, once my grandfather had died, my dad and his siblings decided to bury the hatchet as well, and we spent Christmas together. We ate, played games, listened to stories of when our parents were kids. Tears were shed over old memories and the making of new ones. We still do Christmas together every year, and even though I’m almost 30 now, I still get giddy just thinking about it!
My favorite holiday memory is attempting to make gingerbread houses with my younger cousins. The kids all excited and pumped up to have sugar. When trying to assemble the gingerbread pieces, they all kept breaking till we did not have any left. It was a fun memory because we made the best out of the situation, by creating hideous houses with only candy stacked on top of each other.
Traveling from Maryland up to Staten Island as a youngster with my parents after they flew out of work on Christmas eve…sitting around in the house my great grandfather had built when he came to this country from the Ukraine at 18…warm Christmas lights and piles of presents so high and wide you could barely walk around…and sitting on my great grandpa’s lap telling him stories…and finding out years later that my parents winced the whole time since he was frail and I was growing!
When we children were small, on Christmas morning, in addition to our gifts at our place at the table would be a large perfect piece of fruit. No blemishes or bruises, and always extra large in size. To this day we still call them Christmas fruit. Especially the apples.
My favorite holiday memory is the year my family first did a seafood feast on Christmas. There were crab cakes, stuffed fish, bacon wrapped shrimp, steamed clams and so much more! We’ve been keeping the tradition up ever since, but none were quite as extravagant as that first seafood dinner.
My favorite holiday memory as a kid was driving around to look at Christmas lights. On Christmas Eve we made home-made pizzas for dinner then got into our pajamas and bundled up in the care. We always listened to the radio station that played 24/7 Christmas music, and the evening always ended with us laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe!
My favorite holiday memories are of going to my cousins’ house for Christmas. My aunt would always make a ton of food, including a colorful jello mold. Meanwhile, there were a lot of kids and we were constantly up to no good and annoying all of the grown-ups. Then after dinner, we would all sit down and open all of the gifts from each other.
One of my favorite memories is baking snickerdoodles for the first time during the holiday season. My mother being an immigrant to the US didn’t know a thing about baking cookies and bought tartar sauce instead of cream of tartar. Clearly tartar sauce belongs with seafood and not in cookies. The cookies turned out a bit wonky, but nonetheless it started my love affair with baking and food. It still makes me laugh till this day.
My favorite Winter memory is bundling up my little one and pushing him around in his stroller looking at all the Christmas lights. It has been an ongoing three year tradition and his eyes still light up like the very first time!
I grew up in Northern Indiana (land of lake effect snow), so many Christmases were white. I remember going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve one year. When we came out of church (which was quite a relief because mass was so long and it was freezing inside), there were about six more inches of snow than when we went inside. The snow was falling fast and hard, but we were able to make it home safely before the roads became too treacherous. The next morning was awesome because the whole world was covered in about a foot of clean white snow, and we didn’t have to go anywhere – we just stayed inside and ate good food.