Date: December 4th-11th
Location: at your favorite restaurants and stores
Edible Austin hosts this week long benefit for Urban Roots.
Of course we think every week should be “eat local week,” but Edible Austin’s Eat Local Week, their winter fundraiser event, is an invitation to Central Texans to explore and celebrate the abundance of local food and to raise money for Urban Roots, a youth development program that uses sustainable agriculture as a means to transform the lives of young people and to increase the access of healthy food in Austin.
When you intend to eat local it may be more challenging than you realized to find restaurants and markets that truly support local farmers and food artisans. We’d like to offer you a few questions to ask to determine if you are actually eating local.
- How often does your menu change? (Frequent changes are good. It usually means they are working with seasonal harvests)
- Can you highlight some of the locally-sourced items on your menu/in your store?
- How often do you feature and/or promote local foods?
About Sourcing
- How does your restaurant/market define local?
- Where does your restaurant/market get local food? (direct from farm, 3rd party, or grocery store?)
- Is the local food you purchase certified organic?
- We prefer eating humanely raised, pastured meats. Do you know if your meats are raised this way?
Encourage more Local Food
Be sure to voice your desires for local food to your server, chef, or market owner. Don’t hesitate to let them know that you are more likely to be a loyal patron and promote their business if they feature more local, organic choices.
If you are not the assertive type but you still want to make the most sensible choices the Environmental Working Group publishes a wallet guide and iphone app that recommends avoiding the “Dirty Dozen,” a list of conventionally grown fruits and vegetables (that test positive for as many as 67 chemicals) in favor of the “Clean 15.”
In “A Brief History of Tamales,” Claudia Alarcón will speak about the central role that tamales have played in Mexican cooking and culture, from their origins among the ancient Mesoamerican cultures that existed in what is today Mexico, to its present-day use as an essential food at celebrations and their persistence as a traditional food for the holidays in the U.S., including a step-by-step visual guide to the process of making them.
Join Slow Food Austin for our monthly third Thursday Happy Hour at Péché. Chef Jason Dodge will be offering a specially created Slow Food appetizer menu featuring seasonal ingredients. A special drink menu will be available and served up by the seasoned Péché bartenders, including Maker’s Mark cocktails, Bombay Sapphire Gin cocktails and select wines. Drinks will be CASH ONLY. RSVP to 
This month part two of our three part series on the culinary history of Texas will focus on how the African American culture has influenced Texas cuisine. Culinary history has been cruel to African American cooks.For more than 200 years, the Aunt Jemima image has been powerful shorthand, used to minimize the role of black women in the creation of southern cuisine. But cookbooks are recognized as one important way women assert their individuality, develop their minds and structure their lives. With that in mind, Toni Tipton-Martin as a modern, food professional, puts on the aprons of great black cooks by peeking into their recipe collections. She looks beyond ingredient lists and instructions to see the talents and skills that have been ignored by historians. Her presentation explores slave narratives and rare black cookbooks from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to crack the Jemima code and to tell a remarkable history that destroys a myth and reconstructs a new role model for today. Through Toni’s discoveries, audiences see that there is a lot more wisdom to learn from Aunt Jemima than just her recipe for great pancakes. She helps us all restore a little warmth to our kitchens of granite and steel.
Date: Saturday, November 6, 10 am – 1 pm
Date: Thursday, October 21st, 5pm – 7pm
We kick off our series at the beautiful Rain Lily Farm with Chef Wolfgang, the Mozart of Eastern European foods, and owner of the famous Fabi + Rosi. Chef Wolfgang Murber will tell the tale of how Eastern European foods made their way to Texas and found a home in the kitchens and stomachs of early Texans. To further illustrate the ways German and other Eastern European foods have influenced our cuisine, Chef Murber and Chef Elizabeth Winslow of Rain Lily Farms will do a live cooking demonstration of schnitzel and fried chicken.