The blog redesign/merger party!

My friend Melody over at Creative Radiance is giving away one of her cool plarn bags. You should NOT go register to win because I want to win. But go read her blog and buy something from her etsy store anyway! :-D

And, because I think giveaways on blogs are fun and a good idea I'm going to copy Melody.

In honor of the upcoming holiday baking season I'm going to give away a copy of America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book (This is from me. ATK has no idea who I am as far as I know!)

Here’s how you enter (again, copied from Melody – I’m such a thief!)
You get one entry for a comment here telling me what you want me to write about most with my new blog merger.
You get one entry for a comment linking your twitter post that links to this post.
You get one entry for a comment linking to your blog where you link this post.

(You can put all three things in one comment if you want)

Then I'll number all the entries and put them in a random number generator and pick the winner!

Deadline to enter: Friday, October 9th by 8:00 a.m. central time. Winner will be announced by Friday evening as long as all goes according to plan.

and the winner is. . .

. . . Jackie. So, Jackie - if you'll leave me a comment with your e-mail address I'll contact you with info on how to claim your prize! Congrats!

Hopefully we'll have another give-away in April!


You all had some yummy sounding pizza toppings - I got hungry just reading!


(for the curious - I had one commenter comment twice but I just merged those two comments together as one for numbering purposes. :-) )

The "warm spot" and a prize for you!

While making a deep dish pizza the other day I got to the point in the recipe for the dough where it says "let dough rise in a warm spot." I don't know about you - but I've always been a bit unsure as to where my "warm spot" was. I saw a tip on a cooking show the other day that I thought I would try out. You preheat your oven to 200-250 degrees while you're making the dough. Once it's time to let the dough rise - you turn the oven off and put the (oven safe) bowl with the dough covered tightly in plastic wrap in your oven. It works wonders!

Little ball of pizza dough all wrapped up and ready to grow!

My, how you've grown! (time lapse: 1 hour)

And, speaking of the time lapse - I will not be making this again for QUITE some time as it took HOURS. That's way too long to wait for a pizza. It was REALLY good though:

Yum!

The pizza I made is a recipe from America's Test Kitchen. As you know I like to honor their copyright since I feel like they actually do work to get these recipes and they belong to them - and I was wishing that all of you could have the recipes too (even this way-too-time-consuming pizza dough recipe). It occurred to me that that makes a GREAT idea for my first-ever give-away.


So, up for grabs here is winner's choice of one of the following America's Test Kitchen Cookbooks:

ATK Family Cookbook (This is the one I own)

The Best of ATK 2009

ATK Family Baking Book

Just a little something to say, "Thanks for reading!"

Rules: Leave a comment to enter. (One comment per person). Stealing from the playbook of The Pioneer Woman Cooks - in your comment answer the question: What are your favorite pizza toppings?

I have some ideas for others give-aways brewing in my head now - so, since I don't have that large of a readership - I'm going to make a "you can't win twice in a row!" rule. Hopefully that seems fair to everyone.

Deadline to enter: 9:00 p.m. EST Sunday, March 8, 2009. Winners will be announced either Sunday night or on Monday.

I'll number the comments received up to that time and then use a random number generator to come up with the winner!