Celebrating 10 years of IFR with a Giveaway

You know you're lucky when you look out at your driveway in the middle of a snowstorm to see your neighbor's kid shoveling the snow that you were doing your best to ignore.

Shoveling snow
a welcome sight

You know you're lucky when a package arrives all the way from the upper mid-west with home-made nocino, Indian pickles and Kashmiri veri masala.

Grateful for good friends
Hot and boozy gifts

You know you're lucky when Shilpa sends you fragrant organic tirphal, along with mace, nutmeg, kokum from her father's property near Bangalore and two very special pickles made by her mother: kochle nonche and ambli pickle.

Fragrant Tirphal
Fragrant and relatively rare spice: tirphal

You know you're lucky when Aparna sends you flavors of your childhood with more kokum and tirphal, dagadphool, dried red chiles, vanilla pods and famous Goan cured pork sausages.

A gift from Aparna
Gifts that remind me of my childhood

You know you're lucky when there are so many things to be grateful for, on a daily basis. I know I am.
From the magnificent beauty of where we live to the supportive neighborhood where we make our home to the friends and family in our lives.

I also know I'm incredibly lucky when I look back at the ten years that I have been blogging and realize that I have met some of my best friends through my blog. My very first post was on March 12, 2003. It was as clueless as I was about blogging, but I was also very clearly testing the Blogger platform, then owned by Pyra Labs. I was never a prolific blogger nor do I intend to be. I blog at my own pace, on my own terms and without succumbing to the pressures of the blogosphere, especially the food blogging community.