Marx Foods

Here we are, folks! It's hard to believe the 37 Cooks' journey began only a few short months ago with a little bit of spice and some adventurous cooks. Now here we are with our first sponsor! Marx Foods has been in business since 1895, and until 2007, only catered to the top chefs in the country. They decided to expand their business to include home chefs. We are so glad they did.

As we've been cooking with their ingredients for the past several weeks, we've all noticed the quality is second to none and far superior to most. We sure hope Marx Foods and our readers agree that our recipes are as wonderful as the ingredients used to make them.

For the next few weeks, we will post our recipes for your enjoyment. We hope you cook some of them for yourself, your friends, and your family! And since we wanted to give ourselves time to fully explore our own creativity with these many ingredients, we will also bring you even more recipes in January next year!

Just so you know, here's how it all went down.

Our own Donna Currie and Marx Foods collaborated. There were secret meetings and everything. One day, all of us received boxes on our porches and in our mailboxes from Marx Foods! This is what we found:

Tahitian Vanilla Beans 

Dill Pollen

Dried Wild Porcini Mushrooms

Sargol Saffron Threads

Dried New Mexico Chilies

Dried Organic Shiitake Mushrooms

Dried Guajillo Chilies

Dried Puya Chilies

Initially, there was celebrating! Then we had about two days of fear and anxiety! Many of us had never worked with some of these ingredients. But then we just did what we all love to do. We got to work in the kitchen. Or should I say we started playing around in the kitchen. We had fun! We hope you will too!

What does a sponsored post mean to 37 Cooks? As you know, we are a group of cooks wh0 are friends. We live all over the United States and Canada. Many of us have never met in person! Yet we have known each other for years. Marx Foods provided us with the above ingredients at no charge. We have not been paid by Marx Foods or anyone else for our participation in this challenge. We just do this for fun. Our members were given few guidelines for this challenge. Their start date was the date they received the box from Marx Foods. Their recipe submission due dates were Sunday, October 7, 2012 and Sunday, January 20, 2013 . As a group, we decided we would post links to all of the Marx Foods ingredients in our recipes. And that's the way we roll here at 37 Cooks!