Win Dinner for 4 Worth $200 at Your Home by GochYa Cooking
Tell us Your Favorite Italian Dish and You Could Win Dinner for 4 with GochYa Cooking
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a gourmet chef come in to your home and prepare a 5-star meal for you and your family or friends? Perhaps you want to have a nice cocktail party but don’t want to be bogged down with food prep, cooking, and clean up? If so, then you should be delighted to know that this month you have a chance to win something like this with local author and chef Cynthia Goch of GochYa Cooking.
For our first grand prize in our new monthly giveaway, GochYa Cooking and Lexus of Chester Springs have teamed up to give one lucky winner a $200 gift certificate with Chef Cynthia Goch, author of “MaMa Mia Cucina – A Flavor of Good Food and Good Family”. Chef Goch will come into your home and prepare dinner for you and your guests, from appetizers to dessert.
Not Actual Certificate
About Cynthia Goch
Cynthia Goch resides in the Exton area and offers hosted meals, parties, and culinary classes in your home, at the office, for charity events, you name it. Cooking with Cynthia is so much more than just eating. Her book and recipes not only bring food to the table, but the generations of love within a family. Just think about the possibilities you will have with this!
HOW TO WIN!
To help select a lucky winner, we are asking participants to share a story about his or her favorite Italian dish. The story doesn’t have to be long. It can be only a sentence or two. For example, “My favorite Italian dish is Stuffed Shells. My family would make me stuffed shells every year for my birthday growing up. It was a tradition just for me.”
Where to Share Your Story?
You can share your story with us here on our blog by leaving a comment below. Simply enter your name and a valid email address to post your comment. Alternatively you can share your story on the corresponding post on our Facebook wall. Keep in mind that we are looking for creative and inspiring stories about your favorite Italian dish to choose one lucky winner.
Not Your Thing?
Don’t have a favorite Italian dish? Subscribe to our blog via email and be entered into our monthly giveaway automatically each month. We give away 2-3 prizes a month and the best way to know which ones to participate in is by subscribing to our blog so we can send you email alerts. In addition you can text LEXUSCS to 41513, to receive text alerts for important announcements like this. You may also LIKE us on Facebook and follow us on AutoConverse.
Click here to view the complete rules for our monthly giveaway.
Good luck and we look forward to hearing about all the favorite dishes out there.
Filed Under: Featured • Insider Email • Local Life
About the Author: AC Jones does mostly service and parts articles. He also does a lot of the finance stuff. In addition to this, AC Jones announces some of the special events, contests, giveaways, etc. He has his own Facebook account which you can click to from his profile on AutoConverse.com.
When I was a kid growing up my mother used to make Chicken Cacciatore. It was my favorite. I think once day, in my teens – I ate it with an entire pound of pasta (on my own). The recipe had been handed down to her from her mother, my grandmother who made it often. Now that I am married, I made sure my Mom passed the recipe down to my wife. She has made it for me (and my parents for years). We used to joke about how she makes it even better than my Mother – just when you thought it couldn’t get better. My Father and Mother have yet to admit it is better – but there are never any leftovers when they come to eat it. Italian meals are the best! But an Italian meal that is passed down at least 3 generations is the best!
Nothing smells, sounds, looks, tastes and, yes, feels like my Dad’s eggplant parm. When you walk in the door, you are hit by the meaty-tomatoey smell of this meatless but hearty dish. Then, you hear the gentle bubbling of the cheese melting into the eggplant, which was carefully breaded and baked to perfection before being layered with sauce (gravy) and cheese. While we’re not allowed to peek when it’s in the oven, when it does come out to sit for what seems like forever (maybe 5 minutes), it’s a feast for the eyes: individual stacks of eggplant layers, beautiful towers of deliciousness. This is no tray over-filled with sauce, but individual portions cooked just right. Last but most certainly not least, the taste and feel. Heaven. Hot, still with a bit of steam, they are so tender you could cut them with only a fork. And the taste? Well, that’s all wrapped up in the smell-sound-look-feel: rich tomato, creamy eggplant, slightest bread-toast, slightly sharp cheese. PERFECTION. That’s Italian.
My favorite Italian dish has always been Sophia Loren.
I grew up in a little town in Upstate NY where 75% of the residents were Italian (I was part of the 25% that was not). There was never a lack of good food to be found, whether it was at a restaurant or a neighbor’s house. One thing you learn living in a small town, is that food helps any situation. If someone has a baby, you bring them food. A relative dies … food. You or a family member’s not feeling well? Food.
I met my husband while he was going to grad school. He was working hard on his dissertation and defense and didn’t have a lot of time to cook. So, being from Upstate NY, I brought him food. A nice cheesy lasagna made with sausage, ricotta, spinach, mushrooms and mozzarella. He got his Ph.D. and ended up marrying me. Was it because of the lasagna? Quite possibly.
Way to go Ladies! These are some excellent stories. I have been giving mention of them on Facebook and linking to those of you with website links. Be sure to connect with me on FB when you get the chance, just click on my name. We will be selecting a winner this weekend and get in touch via email to make arrangements for announcement and pick-up of the gift certificate. Even if your story is not selected, we are grateful for your participation and plan to reward you in some fashion.
I grew up on my mom’s homemade tomato sauce. Every summer she would make batches and batches of it. The house would smell of delicious fresh herbs, homegrown tomatoes, peppers, onions for weeks at a time. She would can all the remaining sauce and freeze it for the year. We never ran out.
So freshly made tomato sauce and take our homegrown eggplants. Sliced down thinly baked off in the oven and made the best Eggplant Parmesan..ever.
I still haven’t found one that even begins to remotely compare.
I really learned to cook in my 30′s with my mother-in-law,
who was such a great cook. One of her favorite dishes, Veal
& Mushrooms, became the traditional dish at holidays and special occasions. It’s very simple. Cut up
veal cutlet into small pieces and fry in oil. Saute mushrooms in olive oil, with salt, pepper and garlic powder.
When both are cooked, drain mushrooms and add to veal. Pour
in about 2-3 cups of homemade sauce and cook down until sauce is thick. Serve on toast points. This is still my
daughter’s favorite dish. My mother-in-law has passed, but
I still have her handwritten recipes that I have passed onto
my daughter.
We’re not Italian, not even a little bit, (German, Irish, American Indian) but every year on Christmas Eve we always wanted to do something quick and delicious for dinner at Grandma’s house. She had her own take on spaghetti with scrambled hamburger and onions, cook the spaghetti, and then blend everything together again with cans of condensed tomato soup, maybe a little hot sauce. This was Grandma’s signature dish. Sometimes we would have a lasagna to accompany it, too. It was actually something we looked forward to every year.
As Grandma got older, her grandchildren began taking over the meals for the holidays. We HAD to have her spaghetti. One year my sister and I were cooking, me apps, her the main meal but I couldn’t find the sour cream I had bought for my dip. At mealtime we realized the lasagna was runnier than ever, my sister had used sour cream instead of the ricotta cheese. We had a great laugh over it, but were so thankful we had the spaghetti!
Now Grandma’s gone, but her memory and legacy live on. Every Christmas Eve we still have her spaghetti, but we leave the lasagna in the past, just in case….
Every Sunday, my mother would make dinner for anyone who wanted to join us. Since she never knew how many friends we would bring home, she normally made a big pot of sauce with homemade meatballs and sausage. Sometimes she kept it simple and made pasta other times she’d make a big tray of lasagna. The sauce would cook all day and the house would smell amazing. 2o some years later, my friends still talk about Sunday dinners at our house. I hope that as my kids get older, their friends will want to be at our house for dinner and that I can give them the sane memories my mom gave us.
Loving the stories girls. We will be sharing links to your site from our Facebook page over the next few days. If you are on Facebook then please LIKE our page and respond to our posts about you. This way we can each help with one another’s sites. Good luck with the contest.
During Hurricane Irene, I had the brilliant idea to make my own sauce using the last of the Roma tomatoes from my garden.
From my blog: “Severe weather makes me want to cook. Quite possibly this is due to our frequent and sometimes prolonged power outages and fear of losing my refrigerator’s contents.
Today I was determined to use the last of the tomato crop to make homemade sauce, something I have never done before with fresh tomatoes. I blanched and then peeled and then simmered and then congratulated myself on being such an outstanding homemaker, the kind who makes fresh sauce right before a hurricane. Pride is a sin; when will I learn that? I was grinding some sea salt into my sauce when — BOOM! — the top broke off and dumped about 20 tablespoons of salt into my pot. Then I cried a little.”
Fortunately, I got back on the horse and kept on cooking, and that night we enjoyed Baked Penne with Sausage and Peppers — our last good meal before the power outage!
I never met a lasagna I didn’t like. But the best kind for me has a rich, full flavored sauce and both beef and sausage in the filling. And LOT AND LOTS of oozey gooey mozzarella cheese. Not too much ricotta, thank you. Hold the seafood. I must say that I tend to order it every time I am at an Italian restaurant. Sorry spaghetti, sorry gnocchi. I love that lasagna! When I serve it at home, it’s a special treat and everyone is thrilled. But I guarantee that my lasagna doesn’t hold a candle to Cynthia’s. And for that matter, if it’s gnocchi you prefer, Gichya Cookin’s gnocchi is positively THE BEST!
Every Christmas Eve we would have my great Aunt’s version of The Feast of the Seven Fishes. She would start the dinner with a pasta course of Capellini with mushrooms and olive oil. The flavor of her dish never wavered, she rarely used recipes and would give vague instructions if asked how to make a particular dish. I have never been able to create just the right balance, but maybe food memories are like that, just a little bit better in our dreams.