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

Thanksgiving Wishes and a Giveaway!

November 23, 2016 by Mary 7 Comments

Thanksgiving is tomorrow!! I want to thank you all for your friendship and support. I love reading all of your comments on my posts. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I would like to give away 3 free year-long subscriptions to MARY’s secret ingredients as my gift to you to help you with easy cooking and healthy eating with all the products and the recipes that come with our box. Just enter below and we will randomly select 3 winners!!

LOVE’s Thanksgiving Giveaway

I wanted to share with you something I’m so proud of! Our oldest son and his wife held a Friendsgiving this past Saturday — just look at this spread!! They had 15 of their friends come for an early complete Thanksgiving dinner. He roasted his turkey on the grill and made a pork shoulder. Everyone brought a dish and his wife made my cranberry recipe. Such fun!! I wish I could have been a fly on the wall.

For last minute help, if any of you need it, here is a link to my Thanksgiving cookbook again.

Thanksgiving recipes and process in an e-book format, beautifully designed to give you a magnificent feast.

My complimentary Thanksgiving e-book of recipes and step-by-step process

Everyone have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!! Cherish your time with family and friends and don’t eat too much. 🙂

MSI Shares the Love – Giveaway and Fantastic Crispy Potatoes!!

April 21, 2015 by Mary 14 Comments

A handful of our wonderful investors in MARY’s secret ingredients crowdfunding campaign were also avid subscribers so they said they didn’t need their boxes (duplicates) from the campaign. So we would like to share the LOVE and give away their 5 spring boxes!! All you have to do for this giveaway is tweet the name of your favorite potato recipe, that you like to share with your family and friends, with the hashtag #MSIsharesTheLove. For those of you who don’t normally tweet, here’s your chance to learn how! Please make sure you use the hashtag handle (#MSIsharesTheLove) so we can group you all together. Tweet between now and April 25th (this Saturday) and then we will randomly pick the 5 winners to receive a FREE spring subscription box*! So tweet away and good luck to win!!

My husband LOVES crispy potatoes and is always asking for them. I have one surefire recipe but it uses tons of butter and olive oil to get them that way, which is just way too fattening.

So this past Sunday, for my son’s birthday dinner party, I made these.

My naysayers said these potatoes would dry out, not be good, most likely be dehydrated. How can they possibly be baked that long?

Ha!!

CRISPY BAKED YUKON GOLD POTATOES – serves 4 – 5

2 lbs. Yukon Gold potatoes, 2” in diameter, scrubbed
Olive oil
Maldon Sea Salt

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Wash and scrub potatoes, dry and prick all over with a fork.

Place potatoes on the oven rack and bake for 1.75 hours, until skins are hard and crispy.

Remove from oven and using a serrated knife, cut in half, but not all the way through. Drizzle with your best olive oil and sprinkle on the Maldon Salt. Enjoy!!

So now don’t forget to tweet us your favorite potato recipe. Is it crispy or soft?

Please remember to use the hashtag handle #MSIsharesTheLove to win your free box. Buy an extra one as a gift – Mother’s Day is coming! As Joan, one of our subscribers recently said, “Love these boxes. Have found new things I wouldn’t have tried by seeing them on a shelf in the store.”

This is our reason for being! – to inspire your cooking with new flavors, cuisines, ideas. To put excitement back into YOUR kitchen!

Thank you Joan for being a subscriber!! We LOVE hearing this feedback!

* Free box includes shipping in the Continental USA only.

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!

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

Thanksgiving Wishes and a Giveaway!

MSI Shares the Love – Giveaway and Fantastic Crispy Potatoes!!

MARY’s secret ingredients Giveaway Winners announced!

MARY’s secret ingredients GIVEAWAY!!!

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