Food Gal Giveaway — BlackboardEats Memberships
When perusing restaurant reviews, do you find yourself smacking your lips, eager to try the dishes described in such tantalizing detail?
Now, BlackboardEats makes it not only easy to do so, but friendlier on the wallet, too.
The new Web site and e-newsletter features restaurant reviews written by professionals, including the ever-popular Marcia Gagliardi at Tablehopper. Reviewers pay for their meals; they are not comped by restaurants.
Each review sent to subscribers via email is accompanied by a promotional offer such as 30 percent off your tab or a $30 prix fixe meal. When you see an offer that tempts, you have 24 hours to log into the site to receive a special passcode to access that specific offer. Once you do, you have 30 days to use it at the specific restaurant.
Recent restaurants featured include Etoile at Domain Chandon in Yountville, SPQR in San Francisco, and Baker & Banker in San Francisco.
The Food Gal will be giving away three annual memberships (valued at $20 each) to BlackboardEats so that you can check out the deals yourself.
Contest: Because BlackboardEats operates right now only in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City, entries should be limited to those who live in those areas. Enter now through midnight PST Feb. 19. The three winners will be announced on Feb. 21.
How to win?
With a name like BlackboardEats, I can’t help but wonder what your favorite thing to eat was when you were in school back in the day. Best three answers win the BlackboardEats memberships. Here’s my own answer:
“When I was in grade school, any day was a good day when the cafeteria was serving mashed potatoes with gravy. Who even knew if it was made from boxed flakes or real tubers. Still, there was something so delicious and fun about an ice cream-scoop-sized mound of mashed potatoes covered with warm, brown gravy. The next best thing? When my Mom sent me to school with a brown-bag lunch of cold, fried chicken drummettes from a Chinatown deli. I was always the envy of my friends on days like that.”
Awesome giveaway. It was not so nice that they had to start charging, but that’s business! Best back in the day school lunch…pizza day. It was truly soggy cardboard with rubber cheese pasted on top, but it was pizza. So you could give your tuna sandwich away and have something much ‘better’.
My favorite meal in grade school was chicken croquettes. It sickens me to think about what I was consuming, but I suppose, like many children, I liked bland deep-fried food.
Taquitos in high school. Before there was senior privilege of going off campus for lunch, we opted for pairs of crispy and fried chicken-filled tubes of tortilla piping hot and straight from the fryer. Considered mighty fresh after a day of rigorous, sleep-inducing classes. If the Mexican flatulas were not available, there was always Arby’s or KFC – boxes of meat and carbs, vegetable-less and oh-so-good. Those were the days when ignorance of calories, the food pyramid, and healthy were bliss. 😉
When I was a kid I used to love fish sticks for lunch. I would top it off with some yummy tartar sauce. Something I would never go for now!
This blog question helped me to discover why my tastes often confound even me — when presented with a choice between an upscale dish and another more common choice, not a slam dunk as one might expect; it’s not unusual that I select the latter (given an attraction to my taste of course). Therefore my occasional very pedestrian choices can be traced back to grade school days when I looked forward to warm milk and graham crackers! Probably because that duo represented a sense of safe, warm ‘n fuzzy continuity and I played games trying to see how long the graham cracker in my mouth could remain firm before the milk caused it to “melt”. A close second, of course, in itself another plain vanilla favorite: a pb&J sammy. 😉
Nice giveaway 🙂 My favorite food was only a toasting French bread with lots of butter.
I felt like we had the best school lunches growing up in Honolulu. Every day was a different entree always served with a carton of milk, a side salad (which I always ate) and dessert. And I don’t want to date myself but we got all this for a quarter! (Yeah, back when we actually did walk a mile to get to school.)
One of my favorites is the good ole’ Sloppy Joe. It’s ironic that it’s my favorite because growing up (and still today as an adult) I’m a bit of a neat freak. I used to eat my lunch in sections, eating the salad, then the entree, then dessert. Never mixing bites here and there. So sloppy isn’t really in my vocabulary. But something about the Sloppy Joe, whether it’s the flavor or the fact that the sauce soaked into the bun and made everything soft and juicy, just brings a smile to my face. An oddly enough, the Sloppy Joe’s weren’t necessarily super slopppy. Sure, a few clumps of ground beef would fall out as I slowly ate the bun in a systemized concentric pattern, but it still held together.
It’s funny how a lot of school lunch favorites aren’t a part of our regular diet when we grow up. It may be my adversity to eating too much red meat, so I haven’t had a Sloppy Joe in many many years. Or maybe it’s because I don’t use those ready-mix packets any more so don’t have the perfect recipe for Sloppy Joe’s made from scratch. But when I look back, I think now that a perfect, juicy, Sloppy Joe may be just the item I’d like as my last meal on Earth.
I was never a big eater as a child, my dad was a chain smoker and my taste buds were shot therefore everything tasted like cardboard and eating was a chore but I always find some room for fruit filled crepes or pierogies.
What a charming idea… love the very concept!! We never did have the luxury of this sort in schools here, but reading it through books kept the mouth watering!
I remembered school lunch was not always appetizing so if I had a quarter with me I would buy a slice of pizza and a soda from a local Italian pizza store or if I had a dollar, I would go across the street to a local Chinese meat store and get one dollar worth of roast pork and shared it with my friends. I attended a school located in NYC Chinatown and next to Little Italy. These are still my favorite foods.
We had different exchange students every year when I was growing up. Nothing was more wonderful than discovering that a stroopwafel from Barbara or a pulparindo (tamarind candy) from Claudia had snuck into my otherwise very Wisconsin-midwestern lunchbox.
This is super gross, but in elementary school, I LOVED eating the single pats of butter. I would take all the uneaten pats from my friends, and eat and eat and eat. Yummy! I guess I still might do that, but am old enough to recognize that it is not really sightly to do so. Instead, I eat butter hidden in my food. And plenty of it!
I have always loved raisins with an unexplainable passion. When I was a kid, my mom always put raisins in my lunch. One day she forgot. I brought the entire lunch home. When asked why, I answered, “Well, I don’t think it was MY lunch. It didn’t have any raisins in it.”
So it was raisins and the delicious white rice loaded with salt and pepper in the school cafeteria.
We carried lunch to school. Mom would sandwich thick slabs of roasted turkey between slices of challah slathered with Russian dressing (which is to say, mayo and ketchup stirred together), wrap ’em up, stack ’em in the freezer, and throw one into the lunch bag in the morning. You were lucky if it was defrosted enough to eat around the edges at lunch time. Frozen turkey = not pleasant. She was also the innovator of leftover cold hamburger on a bagel. I preferred Ring Dings from the vending machine.
Pingback: Tweets that mention Food Gal » Blog Archiv » Food Gal Giveaway — BlackboardEats Memberships -- Topsy.com
My elementary school cafeteria used to serve breakfast and I always, ALWAYS looked forward to “hot dog sandwich” days. It was very simply: a hot dog sliced in half lengthwise, rolled into a toasted slice of Wonder Bread. I was 9. I loved it.
In hindsight, the hot dog was way too salty and the bread tasted like cardboard. Adults are no fun.
My favorite school food was when they started serving milkshakes. You had to get a token after you’d bought a “real” lunch. Didn’t they know we’d figure out a system to store up and trade those tokens to get a milkshake whenever we wanted it? Especially when you’re wearing braces!
My favorite thing to eat when I was in high school was: pastrami sandwich w/ two huge warm buns, meaty & fatty pastrami w/ a slice of melted Mozzarella cheese. We also could get some crispy tater tots or a giant chocolate chip cookie + a carton of milk.
I didn’t like high school, but I sure loved lunch time.
i think i ate a bean & cheese burrito and a pepsi every day my freshman year of highschool.
In Junior High School, my favorite was the cafeteria tater tots. Greasy, crispy, and hot, and of course, dunked in tons of ketchup.
At that point in my life, there was no counting calories or watching my fat intake — heaven!!
It was 11:45am, and the smell of exotic spices drifted through the dimly lit auditorium. At the podium, the Psych 101 professor lectured about Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. Dogs salivate when given food -> ring bell before food arrives -> dogs salivate when the bell rings, even if there’s no food.
I felt a bit like a Pavlovian dog as I sat in my purple auditorium chair, dreaming about the curry being served in the cafe that was oddly located in the basement of the pyschology building. As soon as the class was over, I’d hurry to get in the cafe’s line, which would snake all the way to the math building.
When I got to the front of the line, I had to be ready with my order. No indecision, no special requests, or we’d face the wrath of the Curry Nazi — a big, Caucasian man with graying hair and a red apron. His wife, possibly from Thailand, manned the register. In back, her relative would be dishing out today’s special. My favorite was the chicken curry in coconut sauce, served over rice in a styrofoam tray. It had tender pieces of dark meat chicken, onions, carrots and potatoes that had absorbed the rich, complex, spicy flavors of the yellow coconut sauce.
I don’t remember much from Psych 101 anymore, but the lessons from Thai Cafe are still fresh in my mind. It’s where I learned how to enjoy spicy food in general and Southeast Asian cuisine in particular. It taught me to appreciate the richness of coconut milk, the savoriness of fish sauce, and the piquancy of sriracha. These are lessons that I use on a daily basis now.
I haven’t been back to that Thai cafe in over ten years. According to Yelp (http://www.yelp.com/biz/thai-cafe-stanford?q=thai), it still exists, but things may have gone downhill. Still, I will always remember it with fondness. Thank you Psych Building Thai Cafe.
Contest is now closed. Come back Monday to see who won, as well as to participate in a great new contest.
Pingback: Food Gal » Blog Archiv » Food Gal Ticket Giveaway and Foodie Happenings