Menu for Hope 4

I just placed my bids for the Menu for Hope 4 hosted every year by Chez Pim. What it is is a raffle where food bloggers from around the world donate prizes for people to bid on. The prizes range from autographed cookbooks and food treats (so many chocolate prizes!) to free meals at fancy restaurants and a full-blown pizza tour of NYC. The proceeds go to the UN World Food Programme, with this year's money earmarked for a school lunch program in Lesotho. If you click through to Pim's site, there are a ton of links explaining Menu for Hope, a complete list of the prizes and some Lesotho-related entries.

I was hoping to team up with Jess to come up with a prize, but when we realized that one of the guidelines was that "each prize offered should have the potential to raise at least $200", we were stumped. Still, that definitely does not keep us from bidding!

So what did I bid on? Not to encourage you to decrease my chances or anything, but I'm going for a tray of yummy-sounding citrus olive oils and wine vinegars, a chocolate package that includes chocolate bars, "confections", cocoa nibs and sipping chocolate from Theo chocolates, two autographed copies of The Amateur Gourmet plus some random "souvenir", the aforementioned NYC pizza tour and dinner for two at Camaje, a French-American bistro in NYC.

Things that fell off my shortlist for one reason or another:
An autographed copy of Gluten-Free Girl plus a care package of gluten-free baked goods--This prize sounds oh-so-good and even though it came late in the game, it has managed to rack up 32 bids in just three days! I sadly dropped it for things that were a little easier to win.
An autographed copy of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From my Home to Yours--As I was nerdily going through each page of donations and counting bids to do the final cut on my shortlist down from 8 to 5 (Yay for the "find" feature!), this was doing ok in terms of bids and then there was one post early in the game for 50 tickets.
An autographed copy of Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking--It ended up being a tossup between this and the pizza tour (both at 25 bids) and I figured if it came down to it, I could always buy the non-autographed book but I certainly can't afford a pizza tour!
An infrawave toaster oven--This prize sounded cool at first, but then I freaked out about the idea of having another large kitchen gadget in Montreal and decided against it.

Anyway, there are a lot more prizes and the raffle ends on FRIDAY. We're trying to beat last year's record of just over $60K (We're just nudging $50K right now), so bid, bid, bid!

To Donate and Enter the Menu for Hope Raffle

Here's what you need to do:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope above

2. Go to the donation site at Firstgiving and make a donation.

3.  Please specify which prize you'd like in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code.

Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice.  For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02 - 2xEU01, 3xEU02.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

 

Check back on Chez Pim on Wednesday, January 9  for the results of the raffle.