Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

MARY’s secret ingredients Giveaway Winners announced!

December 18, 2014 by Mary 3 Comments

To all of you who participated in my MARY’s secret ingredients Giveaway, thank you for making it a huge success! Everyone’s responses were just wonderful, and I’m so happy to announce our winners today.

A little background: I wanted to make sure that the winner was picked completely at random so I had Marie, my MSI Project Manager (and resident opera singer), input everyone’s names into this Random Name Picker. First, we chose our Grand Prize Winner who will receive a full year’s subscription to MARY’s secret ingredients, followed by our two runners-up who will each receive a Spring 2015 box!

And The Winners Are:

Grand Prize: Anne Maxfield!!!

Runners-up: Shaunie and Bill Bryan!

Congratulations Anne, I’m thrilled to be sending you a whole year of my specially curated ingredients. To Shaunie, and Bill, thank you so much for sharing your lovely holiday dishes, I’m delighted to be sending you each a Spring box.

Here are our winners’ favorite holiday dishes:

Anne cooks recipes to put into beautifully packed gifts with her friend. This year they made a wonderful Crunchy Granola (you can get the recipe on her blog here: http://wp.me/p2SJwY-1y). Shaunie makes her Great Aunt’s broccoli casserole recipe, and Bill make a special bison chili with 3 different kinds of beans!

Once again thank you to everyone who participated, including our international friends who shared with us even though they weren’t eligible to enter because we can’t ship outside the continental US, yet. You ALL are winners in my book!

Stay tuned for more recipes using the ingredients from my winter box!

MARY’s secret ingredients GIVEAWAY!!!

December 9, 2014 by Mary 45 Comments

Pictured above was our recent fall box. The winter box will be revealed tomorrow!

My new subscription box business, MARY’s secret ingredients, has been a huge journey for me and my team this year. The support and warmth I’ve received from you means a great deal to me. I want to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all of you who have shared your kind words as well as perhaps purchased or reviewed boxes for us. Your help has been invaluable!

So now, since it is the season of giving, and because I want to share not only my appreciation, but also the wonderful gourmet, international products with you, I am hosting a GIVEAWAY!!!

I’ll be giving away one FULL YEAR’S SUBSCRIPTION of MARY’s secret ingredients (that’s FOUR boxes filled with surprise products) to one lucky follower, as well as TWO SPRING 2015 boxes as runner-up gifts!

The rules are simple; just comment below with your favorite dish to cook for the upcoming holidays (feel free to add a link to the recipe if you have one) and on December 16^th, my team will use a random number generator to choose the lucky winners. Since there are three chances to win, I do hope that all of you will comment and share with your friends!

Unfortunately, if you live outside of the continental United States, (that’s you, Maureen and Charlie Louie), I’m sorry to say you won’t be eligible for this giveaway, as MSI’s shipping is still limited to the U.S. However, please comment below with your favorite recipes anyway. I can’t wait to see what you have to share!

Best of luck to all of you, and stay tuned for more posts about the contents of our winter box and all the great recipes I’ve created using this season’s ingredients.

Now here I’d like to share with you just how NOT to roast a chicken. Remember that great on-the-flash dish I made in front of our guests – the Cumin and Mustard Roasted Chicken pieces with dried fruit? Well on Sunday night, I tried to do that again with a whole butterflied chicken, with a more complex, delicious glaze (thank goodness, because that’s all that was left) and, of course, a longer time in the oven (30 minutes) since it was a whole bird and THAT was my undoing.

Mmmm, lovely….

The fruit totally charred!! Just look!! (Imagine if that happened when I had the guests over!)

Fortunately we could just remove the fruit and enjoy the chicken, which was cooked perfectly. Two prunes and two pears survived.

I know your holiday recipes will all be smashing, unlike this one!

Hurricane Sandy, Halloween and New Features

November 1, 2012 by Mary Frances 3 Comments

Here in NYC, we are all trying our best to weather the most damaging storm. Personally and luckily, both of our homes are fine, no loss of electricity and no loss of trees upstate. But our office has had no power, so we’ve all been working from home or cafes that have electricity. We carry on, but our hearts and prayers go out to those who were closer to shorelines and not so lucky.

Sandy visited on Monday. The howling winds were so loud and scary that evening. It was such a helpless feeling just being in the middle of it. We woke up on Tuesday morning to an eerie quiet in our neighborhood. It was over, but the damage was massive.
And Halloween was last night, in a limited fashion here in NYC, with our major parade being cancelled. Halloween is also our wedding anniversary and I made the most marvelous veal chops for dinner! I’ll share that recipe later.

Meanwhile, with all the holidays coming, I wanted to tell you about our new feature on the right hand side of this blog, listing my favorite Thanksgiving recipes. From the ginger cranberry sauce, to the stuffing and pecan pie, it’s all there, easy to access, for you.

Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

MARY’s secret ingredients Giveaway Winners announced!

MARY’s secret ingredients GIVEAWAY!!!

Hurricane Sandy, Halloween and New Features

Pages

Blogs We Love