Bad to the Bone Give Away and a Note about February Foodie Bits

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It’s the day after Valentine’s Day and I hope everyone not only survived but that you had a wonderful time with those you love. My family enjoyed a most excellent brunch at FINO and I can say I highly recommend a Valentine’s Day brunch. It starts the day off right and helps you avoid the craziness of evening crowds. The option for brunch will probably only come around every few years, but when it’s available, that’s what we’ll do.

This week I have two very exciting announcements to make.

Bad to the Bone Ticket Contest

I’m happy to be able to give away two tickets to the Bad to the Bone Celebrity Chef Competition on February 27. As I’ve mentioned in previous editions of Foodie Bits, Stubbs Bar-B-Q is taking culinary competitions to a higher level by combining star chefs, audience text voting, and live music. Their Bad to the Bone even series launches with a competition featuring three of Texas’ youngest and most acclaimed chefs:

• David Bull, of Bolla at the Stoneleigh Hotel in Dallas, who was named as one of Food & Wine magazine’s Top Ten Best New Chefs in 2003
• Shawn Cirkiel, executive chef of Austin’s Parkside Restaurant, recently named by Bon Appétit magazine as one of the “Hot 10 New American Taverns”
• Paul Petersen, star of TLC’s BBQ Pitmasters, author of Keeper of the Flame Interactive Cookbook, and former executive chef of Café Cenzio at the Gage Hotel.

The chefs will battle it out, each choosing a preferred ingredient to stump their competitors’ culinary prowess. Audience participants and a panel of noted culinary experts will sample the dishes and use live text voting to determine the winning chef. Ticket sales will benefit the Sustainable Food Center which helps more than 20,000 Central Texans access healthy, affordable and locally grown food annually.

If you aren’t the lucky winner of my tickets, you can buy your own online for $35/person.

To Win Tickets

Here’s how the giveaway works:

• The giveaway lasts from the time of this posting through midnight, CST on Sunday, February 21, 2010.
• To enter, leave a comment on this post letting me know which chef you want to win the competition and why. Limit one comment per person.
• For an extra entry each day, tweet about this post and include a link to it in your tweet. Come back here and include a link to your tweet in a comment. For this entry to count, you must link back to your tweet from the comments. Limit one tweet per person per day.
• On Monday, February 22, 2010 I will use Random.org to select a winning comment number.
• I will notify the winner by e-mail, so please be sure to leave a valid e-mail address when you comment. I will never share your e-mail address with anyone for any reason.
• The winner has 48 hours from when I sent the e-mail to respond and claim the prize. If I don’t receive a response, I’ll go back to Random.org to select another winner.

Good luck!

Foodie Bits is Expanding

When I started my weekly Foodie Bits post I was looking for a way to contribute to the Austin community, but I had no idea so many people would find my posts helpful. I’m glad that they have been useful to my fellow Austin food lovers. As I’ve delved deeper into the world of Austin food, I’ve found so very much to celebrate and share with everyone that goes beyond the scope of my weekly Foodie Bits post. I’ve been exposed to fantastic restaurants, specialty shops, food trailers, and more and I’d like to share all of my discoveries with you.

To further our joint adventures into the world of Austin food, I’m expanding my blog to have an entire section devoted to all that is good eats and drinks in Austin. I also want to continue my blog’s focus on food and entertaining, and make it easier for readers to focus on the areas of the site that are of the most interest. Such an endeavor requires a bit of a redesign which will include porting my blog to a new provider. To make that possible by March 1, I’m going to slow down my posting for the next two weeks, but I promise the delay will be worth it.

I’ll publish one more Foodie Bits for February on by this Thursday, February 18, and then, when the March 1 Foodie Bits launches it will be part of my newly renovated site. There’s a lot to do between now and then but I’m very excited about the possibilities.