One Year Anniversary Giveaway

Tomorrow - Friday, September 16 - marks the one year anniversary of this blog.  We've posted at least once each day during this year, and our hope is to continue that pace.  In order to celebrate this occasion, we're offering a giveaway.

We will be giving away two prizes:  A copy of The Best International Recipe by the editors of Cook's Illustrated, and a copy of the Special Edition Cooking Light Readers' Top-Rated Recipes.  Both feature lots of recipes, but each represents a different style of cooking.  Best International Recipes features a selection of dishes chosen from several major cuisines, each presented in the precisely-detailed Cook's Illustrated style.   This book has been around for awhile, but like the other Best Recipe editions, it has demonstrated staying power, and will be a good addition to any cookbook collection.  Cooking Light Readers' Top-Rated Recipes features colorful photos and lots of low-calorie recipes.   It was released last month, but represents the best of all the recipes ever printed in Cooking Light.  Each book offers lots of good things too cook, plus lots of techniques, tips and ideas to inspire variations and entirely original recipes of your own.

In order to enter, simply comment on one of our original recipes.   Pick one of our original recipe posts, make some comment about that recipe - what you like about it, suggestions for making the recipe better, ideas for things to serve with it, etc. - and publish that comment either on the original recipe post or with this post.  Comments submitted by 9 am central time on Tuesday, September 20 will qualify you for one of the giveaway prizes.  Comments on multiple recipes count as separate entries, but any given reader can win only one prize.  We will select two winners by first randomly selecting from among the total number of entries received, then drawing from among the total entry pool minus posts made by the winner of the first drawing.

PS from Juli:  While we deeply appreciate all our readers and commenters, we regret that we cannot ship a prize to readers who live outside North America. 

Repeats, a Giveaway Winner and a Nice Surprise

Much as I love making new recipes - both those of my own creation and others' recipes that are new to me - I also like revisiting tried-and-true recipes.  There's definitely something to be said for making something you know is going to turn out great.

Juli's Pineapple Custard recipe has been seeing a lot of use lately.  In addition to us featuring it with our own Easter dinner, I brought a double batch to my most recent work potluck last Wednesday.   The theme this time around was food with eggs and/or an Easter theme, so the Pineapple Custard went well with that.   It was a big hit.  There wasn't any left at the end of the lunch period, several of my coworkers commented on it, and one asked for the recipe so she could feature it for her own family's Easter dinner.   That's about as high a compliment as one can get when it comes to food.  Juli and I were especially pleased when she got back to me and reported how much of a hit that dish had been with her family.

On Saturday morning I baked up a double batch of my Glorious Morning Glory Muffins.   I'm not sure how making double the recipe ended me up with more batter than needed to make two tins of muffins, but that was the case, so I also made a tin of mini-muffins.  As before, these muffins turned out great... moist, just the tiniest bit spicy due to cinnamon and grated ginger, and full of fruit flavor.  There's a reason I keep making these!

We kept a few to warm up as a quick breakfast - they keep well for several days, and taste almost as good as fresh out of the oven if you just microwave them for about 45 seconds - and I took the rest of the muffins to work to share with my coworkers.   They were as big a hit among my colleagues as they have been in our home.

We randomly selected among the readers who commented on our blog as part of our first-ever giveaway, and the winner was Lena, a longtime reader and fairly frequent commentator.  Our hope is that the prize wll be as big a hit with her as the two dishes featured above have been for us.   We'd also like to thank all of the other readers who left comments.  We appreciate all our readers, but we also appreciate feedback.

Speaking of feedback, on Saturday, April 23, our blog got the most hits it has ever gotten in a single day.   We don't think it cooincidence that a lot of those viewers checked out Juli's Easy Easter Dinner post.  Past posts featuring dishes such as roasts, ham balls and lamb chops.  We concluded that a lot of people were checking out the blog, or returning to get a recipe they'd seen here before, in order to find something to make and serve over the Easter holiday.  We were very pleased to have so many people turning to our blog for so meaningful a meal.  If any of our readers did end up making any of the dishes we've featured, we would love to hear how they turned out.

A Giveaway for Our Readers

Tomorrow - Saturday, April 16 - is the 7-month anniversary of the start of our blog.  We appreciate all of our readers, and since our blog keeps getting more hits each month, we think at least some of them appreciate the work we put into our recipes, our cooking and our blogging.  That said, we'd really, really appreciate more comments... and in order to hopefully generate more comments, we're doing a small giveaway.

We are giving away a set of three softcover cookbooks/recipe collections.  Each is good as new, and in fact they are completely unused, as each represents a duplicate of something we either already had, due to our accidentally buying the same thing twice or receiving a duplicate of something we already owned as some sort of gift or promotion.   The three are last summer's edition of America's Test Kitchen's 30-Minute Suppers, Cuisine's Slow Cooker Menus, and Better Homes and Gardens Best Comfort Food.  Each of these books is pretty good, and in each case, we've either made one or more recipes as-written in the publication, or used one of the recipes to inspire or generate ideas for our own cooking.   Their combined cover price is around $30, and the set will go to one of our readers who posts a comment between today and April 23.

To be eligible to receive this set of cookbooks, all you have to do is to comment on one or more of our posts between now and April 23.   Praise, critiques, a review or testimonial regarding one of our recipes, or suggestions for improving one of our recipes, cookbook suggestions, topic suggestions, a comment on a picture... any and all sorts of comments are fine.  Just send it to us in some manner that identifies you as the person posting the comment, so either post using a Blogspot or Google account, or include your name or some other sort of identifier in the post.   We will randomly select one comment, and the person who made that comment will receive the cookbook set.

So, comment away!