Mark your calendars and make room in your bellies! Join Slow Food Austin for its annual event – the first Slow Food Austin Grub Trivia. Test your culinary chops and nom nom knowledge; enjoy a “grub crawl” of tastings from more than a dozen of Austin’s finest restaurants; find some local brews, wines, and spirits on the bar menu where drinks will be happy hour-priced; win raffle prizes from local favorites and artisans; and watch a raucous halftime show with a hog butchering demo and live auction of the cuts.

We’ll also present our inaugural Snailblazer Award to a member of our food community who has made a significant impact for the cause of “Good, Clean, and Fair Food.”

So, if you think you’re the quickest slow foodie in town, put your money where your mouth is and compete in this ultimate pub-style, food-focused trivia match against up to 30 teams to win the surprise grand prize and the title of the 2013 Slow Food Austin Grub Trivia Champions.

WHEN: Sunday, July 21, 2013, 12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

WHERE: Shoal Crossing Event Center, 8611 N MoPac Expy, Austin, TX 78759 (just south of Hwy 183)

COST FOR TEAMS: REGISTER ONLINE 2-6 Person Team* $200 ($180 early bird price before June 30)

[Team registration includes a reserved table for up to six team members, general admission for team members, and five raffle tickets for each team member. All team names will be included in our event program. Additonal raffle tickets will be available for $1 each. The raffle will include prizes from local favorites and artisans.]

*Ridiculous team names are encouraged.

COST FOR GENERAL ADMISSION: PURCHASE TICKETS ONLINE
Spectator Ticket $20 Slow Food members;
$25 non-members
Special price for farmers, more info coming soon.

[General admission includes our 'Grub Crawl' of tastings from more than a dozen of Austin’s finest restaurants, happy hour-priced drinks at the bar, and the opportunity to see who wins our Grub Trivia competition. Slow Food members will receive five raffle tickets at the door, and raffle tickets will be available for all attendees for $1 each. The raffle will include prizes from local favorites and artisans.]

Thank you to our friends from the Slow Food Dublin convivium who inspired this pub-sytle trivia event!

Date: Thursday, May 16 2013, 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Location: 12th Street Soular Food Garden, 1112 E. 12th Street, Austin, TX 78702
Cost: $15 – includes appetizers, beverages and live music (cash or credit card)

Join us for May’s third Thursday happy hour at a tree-shaded, family-friendly outdoor space on the eastside — 12th Street Soular Food Garden. The evening will be full of delicious appetizers prepared by The Seedling Truck using the bounty of Austin’s local farms, as well as craft cocktails from Treaty Oak Distilling.

Enjoy acoustic musical accompaniment from Jerry Hagins and his string band.

Your $15 donation (via cash or credit card) includes food, drinks and music and goes to support Slow Food Austin’s educational programming.

Date: Saturday, May 11, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
Location: Fruitful Hill Farm, Bastrop, Texas
Tickets: $20, purchase online

You’ve seen their eggs around town, now check out where the magic happens! On Saturday, May 11 we’ll visit Fruitful Hill Farm in Bastrop. Your $20 ticket gets fresh produce and their yummy eggs for you to take home. All proceeds go to Fruitful Hill. Come out to see where your food comes from and support our family farms!

Date: Wednesday, April 24, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: Whole Foods Market at Arbor Trails, 4301 W William Cannon Dr #800 Austin, TX 78749
RSVP: Please RSVP to Chelsea Staires at chelsea@slowfoodaustin.org to attend.
Fee: $0 – Slow Sessions are always FREE to attend. Donations are welcome.

Central Texas summer bounty will soon be upon us! At this Slow Session we’ll learn about what we need to do to prepare for canning and preserving this delicious outpouring of local produce while it lasts.

Kate Payne, author of The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking, will show us what to do with plants that are hearty producers and typical summer bounty in the Austin area like okra, eggplant, peppers, and more. She’ll demonstrate the process of canning and/or preserving to ensure bumper crops don’t go to waste and can be enjoyed for months into late summer, early fall, and beyond.

Slow Food Austin and Whole Foods will provide snacks and drinks.

More about Kate Payne of The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking:

Kate Payne is an author, grant writer, after-hours poet, occasional painter, committed doodler, drive-by trash collector, big-time procrastinator, tea, toast and jam obsessed Austinite. She collects old typewriters; some of them still work. She studied anthropology and sociology in the Sonoran Desert. She worked on a tomato farm once, and paper-mached gigantic thumbs once, too.

The creator of the Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking website and book, Kate is the go to girl for domestic advice–an expert on hip home tricks, thrift stores, flea markets, and Craigslist, and a frequent consultant for design, decorating, cooking, crafting, and urban living sites–as well as an instructor in canning and pickling classes here in Austin, TX.

Date: Thursday, April 18, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: Salt and Time, 1912 East 7th Street, #A, Austin, Texas
Cost: Cash or credit card donations are accepted to benefit Slow Food Austin programming.  There will also be menu items available for $10 and under.

Scholarship Deadline: Wednesday, March 27, 2013.

Slow Food Austin is excited to offer a full scholarship ($280) to the 3rd Annual Foodways Texas Symposium: Our Barbecue, Ourselves. The Symposium will be held in Austin, TX April 4-6.

Foodways Texas is an organization founded by scholars, chefs, journalists, restaurateurs, farmers, ranchers, and other citizens of the state of Texas who
have made it their mission to preserve, promote and celebrate the diverse food cultures of Texas. This year’s Symposium will explore the past, present, and potential of smoked meat in Texas and its intimate connections to Texas cultural history and identity.

Would you like Slow Food Austin to send you to the Symposium? Please complete our scholarship application below and submit by Wednesday, March 27. The scholarship recipient will be announced on March 29.

For more information about Foodways Texas, visit their website: foodwaystexas.com.

Powered byEMF Survey

UPDATE:
Meredith Bethune was selected to receive the scholarship. Congratulations, Meredith!

Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2013, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: The Buzz Mill, 1505 Town Creek Drive, Austin, Texas 78741
RSVP: Please RSVP to Chelsea Staires at chelsea@slowfoodaustin.org if you’d like to attend.
Fee: $0 – Slow Sessions are always FREE to attend! Donations are welcome.

We’ve all heard the phrase “fair trade” tossed around. There is a certification on products that we look for It feels particularly important when we’re considering foods that have to be imported because they cannot be grown locally or regionally. But what exactly does it mean? What is involved in actually “fair trading” as a business that sources coffee?

More about Bootleg Coffee and The Buzz Mill:
Bootleg Coffee is a celebratory ending in the long process of coffee production. By purchasing and roasting high-quality coffees that we would want to share with our friends and families, we make sure that the producers make a living wage, and those who enjoy a fresh-brewed cup get a full-flavor experience. We hope that reverence carries over to the first cup in the morning, or as something special to enjoy with good conversation.

Bootleg Coffee is a community of friends working together to share our love of coffee, and our love of two wheels. We bring a legacy of two decades of roasting experience, working with farmers, and navigating the sensory overload of the cupping room. We do it because we love it. We raise our mug to all of the work that happens before we roast it.

In an 11-city tour of the US, Brooklyn Brewery is bundling up some of its favorite events into The Brooklyn Brewery Mash. The Mash will kick off in
Austin during SXSW Interactive with parties, a farmers’ market workshop, comedy shows, concerts, pop-up supper clubs, and readings, all featuring
delicious Brooklyn Brewery beer. The Mash will demonstrate characteristics of Brooklyn’s unique culture of art, music and food, bringing people together. Proceeds from the Slow Supper, Beer & Books: An Evening with Marcus Samuelsson & Jesse Griffiths event will benefit Slow Food Austin.

Schedule of Brooklyn Brewery Mash Austin Events:

Chaos Cooking
@ a secret location – go to ChaosCooking.com for details
Wednesday, March 6, 7:00 – 11:30PM
Register for Chaos Cooking and RSVP at ChaosCooking.com

In this dinner party with a twist, an Austin native opens their home kitchen to strangers where the guests are the cooks. Attendees will bring ingredients for everyone to cook together. Dishes will be passed around family style, with plenty of Brooklyn beer to enjoy.

Local 2 Ways @ Swift’s Attic, 315 Congress Ave
Thursday, March 7, 7:00PM
Call Swift’s Attic to purchase tickets at 512.482.8842

This multicourse dinner will celebrate regional cuisine interpreted two ways by Chef Mat Clouser of Swift’s Attic and Brooklyn Brewery House Chef Andrew Gerson.

Slow Supper, Beer & Books: An Evening with Marcus Samuelsson and Jesse Griffiths
@ Springdale Farm, 755 Springdale Rd
Friday, March 8, 5:30 – 11:00PM

Tickets are $100 and can be purchased at http://www.togather.com/event/225/marcussamuelsson-in-austin.html
Food Republic, Togather & Brooklyn Brewery present Beer & Books: An Evening with Marcus Samuelsson and Austin’s own Jesse Griffiths in a conversation about technology’s effect on the world of food. Following is the Slow Supper, an outdoor dinner party benefitting Slow Food Austin, co-created by Samuelsson and Griffiths with a helping hand from Brooklyn Brewery’s House Chef. Proceeds from tickets will benefit SFA.

NY Night Train Soul Clap and Dance-Off with DJ Mr. Jonathan Toubin
@ Springdale Farm, 755 Springdale Rd
Friday, March 8, 9:00 – 11:30PM
Free event

In this popular soul party, folks can get down to the sounds of 1960’s soul and the 45s of world famous Brooklyn DJ Jonathan Toubin. There will be a dance contest at 10:30PM for a $100 cash prize and a trip to New York for the Dance-Off championship at Brooklyn Bowl.

Farmers Market Workshop
Saturday, March 9, 10:00AM – noon
Cedar Park Farmers Market, 11200 Lakeline Mall Dr, Cedar Park
Sunday, March 10, 10:00AM – noon
Mueller Farmers Market, Browning Hangar, 4550 Mueller Blvd
Free event

The Brooklyn Brewery House Chef will be cooking up his favorite local finds from the market, as well as dishing out samples and cooking tips.

The Austin Smoke Experiment
@ Clive Bar, 609 Davis St
Sunday, March 10, 1:00 – 4:00PM
Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/331600

Austin’s top chefs challenge each other for the best smoke-themed dish, ranging from savory to sweet. Some chefs go all out in full costume or an elaborate table, but all come to win.

The SXSW Marketing Party
@ Clive Bar, 609 Davis St
Sunday, March 10, 5:00PM
Free event

A party by Brooklyn Brewery, Imgur & Found Footage featuring music by Brooklyn bands Prince Rama, Sinkane and The Dig. Also, odd, rare VHS clips from Found Footage Festival, projection art by Nuit Blanche, and beer from Brooklyn Brewery on the house from 6 – 7PM.

Date: Wednesday February 27, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: Clear Point Wellness, 2001 S. 1st Street, Austin, Texas 78704
RSVP: Please email Chelsea Staires at chelsea@slowfoodaustin.org if you’d like to attend. RSVP not required but ideal.

Since it’s February, this month’s Slow Session is of course about chocolate!

Steve Lawrence comes to Austin by way of San Francisco and Baton Rouge. After years of working and studying under one of the finest chocolatiers in the Bay area and the country and then honing his craft in Louisiana, Steve brought his expertise in and passion for fine, artisanal chocolate making to Austin. Working in small batch quantities with the finest chocolate available from around the world, Steve crafts complex, flavorful, wonderfully delicious chocolate bars, truffles, caramels, and, soon, dessert sauces.

At this slow session, equipped with his fine chocolate-making equipment, Steve will teach us about the art of chocolate making from beginning to end, what is included in his process, how he sources and selects his chocolate, and how he chooses which chocolates to craft. And of course we will have samples! Slow Food Austin will provide appetizers, wine, and beer.

More about The Chocolate Makers Studio:

There is a pleasure that comes from chocolate like no other. It can be as complex or as simple as you please. Often you won’t know how it’s going to hit you until it does, hit you. Sometimes you need just a taste and sometimes you need to taste, and taste, and taste.

At The Chocolate Makers Studio we continually play with chocolate and the flavors that it can magically bring forward and surprise us with–be it a single chocolate all on its own (made from beans from Madagascar alone, for example) or in partnership with other complementary and often surprising flavors, from Rosemary Caramel to Browned Butter with Texas Pecans (where else would we get them?).

We use the finest chocolates available from Europe and the Americas to craft our chocolate offerings–selecting and blending them to bring forward the flavor profiles we think you’ll enjoy.

We’ve built a core, if you will, of chocolates that we can’t seem to go for very long without and we hope you can’t either.  We encourage you take an opportunity to try each and every one.

www.chocolatemakersstudio.com

Date: Thursday February 21st, 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: Hillside Farmacy, 1209 E 11th St, Austin, TX
Cost: drinks $5 suggested donation and appetizers under $10 (cash or credit card)

Come share inventive, seasonal appetizers and a drink or two in this charming space that pays homage to its former life as an actual pharmacy.