Results tagged “competition”

Baconfest Chicago may have been postponed until April, but the VIP bacon cookoff at the Publican slated for October 24 is still a lock. In fact, tickets went on sale at noon.

Welcome back, food lovers. This week on Top Chef Masters, we have: Chef Douglas Rodriguez, Chef Mark Peel, Chef Anita Lo or Chef John Besh. We've got James Beard winners, a Michelin star recipient, and multiple Best New Chef namings. Another impressive bunch. Oh boy, we're impressed and bored already.

Maybe this week a chef will stick a toilet brush in some pasta and everyone will declare it a brilliant new method of stirring. Let's see who is battling it out today: Graham Elliot Bowles from Chicago (we accidentally typed bowels at first - whoops).We dig his Chicago pin on his hat. Suzanne Tracht from Los Angeles enters the kitchen next. Oooo, it's Wylie Dufresne! How is anyone going to beat him when he has +20 hit points and +15 magic potion? Annie Lennox walks in! Oh, no, wait, that's Elizabeth Falkner. She sounds impressive with her James Beard award.

It's American Craft Beer Week and the men behind the Drinking and Writing empire (Steve Mosqueda, Sean Benjamin and Pete Crowley) have planned a unique event to celebrate. Ten homebrewers have been given the basic ingredients to brew their own beer. The brewers are also tasked with pairing it with food either they or others make for them. Then the beer and food will be paired with an artist, writer, musician or dancer, who will interpret the pairing in a slam-style talent competition.

               

Youth boxing phenom Tracy Rollins was billed to lose in the program - and surprised a lot of the crowd by unanimously winning his bout Friday at St. Andrew's Gym (Addison & Paulina, 8p.m.). The youngster, who at 16 was facing veteran boxer Ramon Valenzuela in his first-ever senior Chicago Golden Gloves championship (he's the five-time junior national champion), felt confident before the fight - and the look on his face after said he felt vindicated.

       

There are finals all over the city tonight - or in least two contests we're aware of: stripping and boxing. Both have male-dominated audiences, but the latter is probably a little more socially acceptable -- and something your significant other is inclined to let you go out and see.

Hosting ad-hoc soup kitchens have been all the rage this winter. From 1-4 p.m. Sunday at Custom House (500 S. Dearborn, 312-523-0020) the big boys get in on the act.

        

As Chuck kindly pointed out, I competed in Texas de Brazil and Meals on Wheels Chicago's Inaugural Caipirinha contest (and actually won!). My goal was to take what makes a caipirinha awesome and crank up those flavors - hence sugar infused with lime oils from the zest and the addition of the lime juice from those zested limes. Having turned in my drink recipe and instructions a week before the contest, I felt a little..err,..boring when I saw the fantastic ingredients (ginger, cilantro, blood orange juice, strawberries...) in front of the other contestants' stations and realized it was too late to improvise or change directions. After watching me bite my lip worriedly, Chuck reassured me to stick with my game plan and that simplicity was a good thing. So, without further ado, here is the L-Stop Caipirinha recipe:

Tonight we'll find out if Stephanie Izard wins the title of "Top Chef" in part 2 of the season finale.

Just received notice from the folks behind that June 15 plate-to-plate competition between Stephanie Izard and Nick LaCasse at the Drawing Room at Le Passage.

Who’s your daddy? Gary Iriza, Mr. Palm Springs Leather 2008, is your daddy, sir. Iriza took the leather sash at the XXX International Mr. Leather (IML) Competition Sunday night. (The XXX stands for 30th anniversary, people.) IML is a beauty pageant of sorts, celebrating masculinity and a lifestyle of leather. IML has its roots in the Mr. Gold Coast contest, held in the historic Gold Coast Leather Bar. It expanded to a larger venue in 1979, and with the larger venue came the expanded “international” title.

Stolpman is in Europe for the next two weeks (lucky), so I'll be handling the recap duties until she gets back. Fear not, dear readers, for those of you who'll miss her as much as I do right now, I have two words for you.

We wrote in last week's power rankings that one of the things that keeps us coming back to Top Chef Chicago week after week is to finally see when Lisa will leave. That seemed imminent last week, after she landed in the bottom three in both the quickfire and elimination challenges.

We love American Idol, but not because we like hearing offbeat covers of Top 40 classics. If nothing else, when the audition episodes start airing in mid-January, we suddenly see the light at the end of the winter tunnel, knowing that by the time the confetti is falling around the next media-generated pop star, it will be summer!

Anytime an event is held every few years instead of annually, it takes on some added importance (we're thinking, for example, presidential elections, the Olympics and the World Cup). In the culinary world, this event is the Coupe De Monde De Boulangerie, a bread-baking contest that takes place every three years in Paris. This year, it's part of the Europain exhibition, held March 29–April 2.

Movie attendance is down 10% this year. Bad word of mouth when it comes to this year's mainstream releases perhaps? Moviemaking competitions are a great way to put our money where our mouths are, and here are some worth shooting for:

We took a break from our Dungeons and Dragons to check out the competitive gaming taking place at the Chicago Cultural Center this weekend, which played host to the 2007 U.S. Open. We’re not talking about tennis here. We’re talking about the Rubik’s Cube Championship, where the winner of the 3x3x3 Speed Solve gets an all-expense-paid trip to the 2007 World Rubik’s Cube Championship in Budapest. The competition was was sanctioned by the World Cube...

Memorial Day Weekend is under way, so pull out the grill, set up the yard games, and put on your leather. For 29 years now this Chicago weekend has been synonymous with International Mr. Leather—a leather beauty pageant, leather and fetish conference, adult superstore, and cocktail party rolled up into one giant event that attracted some 15,000 leather daddies, leather boys, leather mamas, and leather girls last year. (Folks, that’s an entire town of fetish...

If you're a writer, Thanksgiving weekend is always rife with material. In addition to amateur night at the bars on T-Day Eve (if you were brave enough to venture out), there are the usual family shenanigans on the day of, and a juicy Black Friday anecdote or two. What's more, the office Christmas party is approaching. If you're feeling starved for material around this time of the year, then you obviously aren't paying attention.

The Cut and Paste Design Competition is coming to Chicago this year. This battle rap of graphic design nerds launched in New York in 2005 and will be taking place at Crobar, 1543 N. Kingsbury, on November 4. Graphic artists are normally given weeks or months for one project, here they will be required to produce design in rounds of 15 minutes in front of a crowd. The winner will receive an Apple MacBook, along...

Torontoist immediately wins our heart by using the word "Jackass" in a headline. In fact, we love their use of it so much that we're going to use it as much as possible throughout this post. For example, it looks like there are Toronto-area jackasses besides those who misuse the sidewalk: look at the crap on sale on Toronto's craigslist. But it looks like Toronto doesn't contain the kind of jackasses who pee in public...

Yesterday at the Chicagoist offices, we were all worked up over this article by Jim DeRogatis of the Sun Times. It's always interesting when someone writes a piece denouncing the very thing that they do. It's along the lines of gossip columnists who complain that Paris Hilton is in the news too much in their own columns. If we were drunk, we'd get into the whole hit-driven economy of the entertainment industry, but we're tired...

Rachel Barton Pine is a violinist on a mission spread classical music. And she's doing it by going on rock stations and playing heavy metal songs on her Guarneri violin.

� Summer Time = Fair Time

Passes for the whole weekend are $140, sorry, no family discount. See the whole schedule here. Did you know the Leather Archives and Museum is in Chicago? It is.