Category: events

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: 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.

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: Wednesday, November 14, 2012,  6:30 – 8:30 pm
Location: Clear Point Wellness, 2001 S. 1st Street, Austin, Texas 78704
RSVP: Not required but helpful. Please email Chelsea Staires at chelsea@slowfoodaustin.org.

In the US, and especially here in central Texas, there is perhaps no time more brimming with culinary tradition than the holidays.  If you’re like us, you look forward all year to this time of revisiting the foods that make you feel most at home. The  comforting sense of place and belonging that comes with preparing food that tastes and smells like home is one of the most powerful aspects of our individual cultural identity.

So, we want to know, what are your family and personal holiday cooking and baking traditions?  What is the dish that the holiday season or special meal just can’t exist without?  Use this Slow Session as the perfect excuse to whip up a batch of one of your favorites and then bring it on down to share, along with the story of your tradition and how you came to love it.

Please bring any dish, savory or sweet, that you would like to share.  Slow Food Austin will provide drink refreshments to accompany our delicious potluck dishes as well as disposable plates and utensils, but please bring your own plate and silverware if you can.