Giant Announces It’s Academic’s 50th Anniversary Reusable Bag Design Contest

September 30, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Around DC, Food and Drink 

Hey DCers, Marylanders and Virginians!!

Here is a great design contest for High School Students-

Your have until October 31st to submit entries !!!!!

Giant Food has announced a reusable bag design contest for high school students to celebrate ‘It’s Academic’s’ 50th anniversary. Entries will be accepted October 1 – 31. The winning design will be printed on reusable bags and sold in Giant stores across the region. First, second, and third place winners will also receive cash scholarships in the amount of $1,500, $750, and $500 respectively.

This is open to high school students in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.  Entries will be accepted October 1 through 31.  Proceeds from the bags will benefit the A+ School Rewards program which schools use to enhance and supplement their budgets.

Go to Giant’s Bag Contest Website for all the Details !!

Win $1000 for Your Original Crab Recipe- Right Now!

August 3, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Around DC, Food and Drink 

GET OUT YOUR COOKBOOKS AND CRABS!

GIANT FOOD &

PHILLIPS SEAFOOD PRESENT

the ‘ULTIMATE CRAB CHALLENGE’ !!!!!

Crab Lovers and Cooks are Invited to Submit Relished Recipes to Win a Cash Prize and a Spot on the Phillips Menu!

Giant Food and Phillips Seafood are hosting the first “Ultimate Crab Challenge” recipe contest, inviting crab gourmets to submit their favorite original crab recipes for a chance to win $1,000 and the opportunity to have their recipe featured on Phillips Harborplace’s menu. Entries will be accepted online at

Ultimate Crab Challenge

beginning July 16 through August 15, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. A panel of Giant and Phillips Seafood chefs will serve as preliminary judges. The top three finalists of the recipe contest will participate in a cook-off on Saturday, September 11, at the Maryland Seafood Festival taking place at Sandy Point State Park in Annapolis, Md.

General rules of participation in the competition are as follows:

All recipes must be original creations and submitted electronically at http://www.UltimateCrabChallenge.com by 11:59 p.m. on August 15, 2010

Crab meat must be the primary ingredient and recipes must call for at least one pound of crab

Recipes can be for a hot or cold dish

Preparation time, including cooking time, must not exceed 30 minutes

Three finalists will be selected by a panel of Giant and Phillips Seafood chefs; if selected as finalists, participants will be allowed 30 minutes to prepare their original crab creations during a cook-off at the Maryland Seafood Festival on Saturday, September 11, 2010

All U.S. residents of at least 18 years of age and of the legal age in their state are welcome to participate

Recipes will be judged based upon taste, ease of preparation, creativity and clarity of cooking instructions. Three finalists will be selected and notified on or before September 2, 2010. Finalists will be invited to participate in the inaugural “Ultimate Crab Recipe Challenge” cook-off at the Maryland Seafood Festival from 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. on September 11, 2010. The first prize winner will receive the grand prize of $1,000 and the honor of having their recipe featured on Phillips Harborplace’s menu. The second and third place winners will receive $100 gift cards to Giant Food and Phillips Seafood Restaurants.

For contest rules and to enter, please visit Ultimate Crab Challenge!!

GOOD LUCK!!

Giant Food is Doing Good For Moms and Health

June 11, 2009 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Around DC 

Giant Food just announced to Mom Bloggers in the area about their ‘Shop For Health, Eat for Life’ Program!  I was unable to attend their ‘Kick-Off’ event, but as a happy Giant shopper, I want to spread the word about this great program because Giant continues to make things easier for moms, and listens to their shoppers.  

Shop For Health, Eat For Life is a partnership of Giant Food and The American Institute for Cancer Research.  The goal is to 

* Help individuals and their families reduce their risk of cancer

and

*raise funds for cancer prevention.

From June 19th to July 2nd, Giant will help AICR spread its message of cancer prevention and good health with several in-store promotions and recipes, free nutrition education materials for kids and adults, and product giveaways in selected pharmacies.

AND, if you are around the Bethesda area, check out the Giant Food store on Arlington Road!  It has just completed a renovation and the store ROCKS!  It now has scanners, self-checkout, and drumroll:

A DELI KIOSK !

The store seems bigger…  The job of re-designing a store must be fascinating and whoever did this, whatever firm, has done a great job!

The employees are great too, but then again, they always have been. 

AND, they have a coffee machine!  You put your money in, it comes out, and

THERE ARE HOLDERS ON THE NEW SHOPPING CARTS!

This has actually made my LIFE easier, I enjoy grocery shopping, my son enjoys it,

he scans everything, he knows how to weigh and print out the labels for produce…

 

Yey!  Thanks Giant!

 

 

Thanksgiving Tips and Healthful Hints

November 25, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Food and Drink, Holidays 

It’s Thanksgiving Week! In honor of all our cooking and clean up

BananaBlueberry is talking with Andrea Astrachan, Consumer Advisor for Giant food.

Here are some helpful hints for moms:

Q. What foods are bargains this month… what can moms ‘stock up’ on and save money on right
now?

Now is a great time to stock your pantry with items like canned soup and chowders, macaroni and pastas, baking items, canned fruit, maple syrup and stuffing mixes.

You may feel like you’ve had enough turkey for a while, but they are at their best prices right now. Buy one for Thanksgiving dinner and another to put in the deep-freezer – it will last six to eight months.

This is also the time of year when I stock up on supplies like aluminum foil, plastic bags and plastic wrap.

Q. What are some TIME-saving tips for making dinner?

• Plan meals for the week- make 2-3 meals and store in the refrigerator and freezer.
• Keep meals simple- shop for time savers like pre-cut or frozen veggies, grated cheeses, and bagged salads.
• On your way home, pick-up a cooked rotisserie chicken or turkey, or baked meatloaf; a loaf of whole grain bread; and a colorful salad from the salad bar.
• Try to cook one-dish casseroles or main courses like chicken cacciatore, meatloaf, and lasagna when you have more time; then freeze for later use.
• Dust off your crock-pot. Prior to leaving home, place chicken or beef, potatoes, carrots and onion with seasoning and water in the crock-pot. When you return, your dinner smells great and is ready to serve!

Q. Can you suggest alternatives to unhealthy, as well as boring snacks for kids- like chips and pretzels?

Absolutely. Cutting back on the sugary, high-fat and high-sodium foods frequently offered in school cafeterias and vending machines is a great way to teach kids healthy eating habits early on. Some of our favorite alternatives at Giant include:
• Select small-sized fruits or serve fruit in different ways, like individual-sized fruit cups and applesauce cups
• Help kids get their “3-A-Day” of dairy with low-fat cheese, low-fat yogurt and string cheese
• Give kids a do-it-yourself project by giving them granola, trail mix, cereal or fruit as a “stir-in” for yogurt, applesauce or cottage cheese
• Popcorn – place it in fun bowels, snuggle up on the couch and call your family room a move theater
• Frozen yogurt – many are so creamy, you would think it was ice cream! (Look for the calcium fortified ones!)
• String cheese (Kids love to pull the strings!)
• Carrot and celery sticks in a clear plastic cup with low fat ranch dressing on the bottom as dip.
• Puddings made with fat free milk with a whipped cream smiley face
• Jell-O shapes – made with a cookie cutter
• Fruit salad – but for little ones, bring to the table singing the popular refrain, “fruit salad, yummy, yummy!”
• Frozen grapes
• 100 percent fruit juice pops
• Rice cakes – spread with peanut butter or soy nut butter on a rice cake. Make a face with raisin eyes, shredded carrot hair, dried fruit mouth or banana slice

Note: Popcorn, baby carrots and frozen grapes are choking hazards for children under the age of 4.

Q. Would you like to add any information or more tips for Moms?

For moms looking to get the best value as they shop, I’d offer these tips:

• Store brands are comparable (or better!) than national brands at a better value. Look for all of our Giant brand products: Giant Food, Nature’s Promise, Simply Enjoy!, Care One, and Companion Pet Food.
• Using the unit price on shelf tags helps you find the best value among comparable products.
• Try Big Buys. Meats in large quantities are not only great for large families, they help save money. Freeze portions for later use.
• Individual packages of snacks may cost more than larger packages. Repackage into single servings at home.
• Sometimes the salad bar is actually less expensive if you only need a small portion and the remainder of an entire package of the item will go to waste.

Thanks Andrea and Giant for taking the time to give moms helpful hints this time of year!

PS- GIANT FOOD FREE GROCERIES GIVEAWAY

September 17, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Food and Drink 

Just another note about Giant Food; they’re giving away a year of free groceries every week for the next several weeks. Go HERE to enter…

FREE GROCERIES FOR A YEAR… what could be better?! Actually, when you read the fine print it’s $5,200.00 of free groceries, so $100 of free groceries for a year- but who’s counting… still a great deal!

GOOD LUCK!

A SHOUT-OUT TO GIANT FOOD

September 8, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Food and Drink 

I have to do a Shout-Out to Giant Food. Their stores look great, employees are SO helpful and they’ve undergone BIG changes…

I went to a great lunch downtown sponsored by Giant some weeks ago, in anticipation of their new logo and all the new stuff they are adding to make mealtime simpler for moms.

I left the next week for the beach. After arriving at our rental house and dropping our stuff down, my mom and I headed to the relatively new Giant down at Bethany Beach. It was enormous and beautiful, and (GASP) had THE DELI KIOSK!!! As I wrote in my previous post about Giant, the idea of deli kiosk is cool, but it’s amazing in ‘real life’.

You swipe your Giant card, enter what you want from the deli, and they announce your order is ready over a loudspeaker system in the store. Could anything be more cool?

Okay, I’m calming down.

Then I returned home from the beach to a big stack of mail. In it I got coupons from Giant, including one for a free reusable bag! Everybody knows that everybody likes free stuff and Giant knows that MOMS like to know about good stuff we can use…

SO, I then headed over to a newly-renovated Giant down Old Georgetown Road a bit. I pulled in a parking space and was helping my little guy out of our car when a Bentley pulled into the space facing us… A little old lady was helped out and walked eagerly toward the new Giant on opening day of the renovation. I thought to myself,

“Giant is doing something right, if a woman is being driven in her Bentley to check out their new store.”

The new store is awesome- with a deli kiosk- and really, some great new prepared foods.

Thanks to Giant for making their stores more family friendly and adding products that may help moms tackle nightly mealtime! Go to their website to learn more and don’t forget about their SIMPLY ENJOY brand- I love it.

Now all I have to do is encourage my Giant on Arlington Road in Bethesda to get a deli kiosk too!

GIANT FOOD RECOGNIZES MOMS

August 13, 2008 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Food and Drink 

I had the absolute pleasure of attending a luncheon sponsored by

Giant Food down at Chef Geoff’s downtown on Tuesday.

Giant Food wants us to know that they love moms.
Frankly, they should; Moms spend the most money in the household and let’s face it-
moms just about always do the grocery shopping.
Everyone should love moms, but that’s a post for another day…

Getting back to Tuesday: Yey- Giant!

We learned lots of incredibly good stuff that is going on at Giant right now,

Got a fabulous and relatively easy lesson from Chef Geoff about making risotto (above),

While having a fabulous lunch.

A few highlights before I head off to the beach:

Prepared foods: Giant will be introducing about 100 new prepared foods in the coming month to help Moms out… including New Rotisserie Chickens!

Simply Enjoy IS A GIANT BRAND! This rocks. This is the only brand brand of spaghetti sauce I use, it’s delicious.

Deli kiosk: this is up there for me with the dawn of baby monitors.

I literally gasped during lunch and had to lay my hands on my chest to regulate my breathing I was so excited. Someday very soon you will be able to go to your local Giant, go to the deli counter, type in what you want… and leave.

When your lunchmeat and cheeses are ready you will hear your name announced on the loud speaker and then all you do is go back to the deli and pick it up! Can you imagine the fabulosity of this? It makes the world a better place… in a little way.

Much more about great things happening at Giant after I get back;

…And I’m trying Peapod- more on that too.

Post Script: Moms out there and especially DC Metro Moms –
give a big SHOUT-OUT of congratulations to Chef Geoff Tracy and his great wife for the birth of their little girl, born just 6 weeks ago… and just 12 months after her twin brother and sister.

Sending lots of wishes for lots and lots of sleep ☺

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