3 Days Left! Inaugural SFC Chef Series at La Condesa

Rene Ortiz, Tyson Cole, Todd Duplechan, Shawn Cirkiel and Jesse Griffiths are creating an unprecedented, 5-course tasting dinner paired with drinks on Sunday, November 8th at La Condesa to benefit Sustainable Food Center. A limited number of tickets have gone on sale today. Please join us to raise awareness of, and support for those in our community without access to fresh, local food while partaking in a meal by chefs who demonstrate an outstanding commitment to supporting Austin Farmers’ Market.

Tickets available at: http://sfcchefseries.eventbrite.com

iPhone Wallpapers for SFC Chef Series Now Available

Want to show the world you’re a proud SFC supporter? Get one of these spanking-new iPhone wallpapers, courtesy of FÖDA STUDIO, inc.

INSTRUCTIONS: Downloading images to your iPhone

http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#photos.syncing-photos-and-videos-with-your-computer

Downloading images to your iPhone from email

http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#photos.saving-photos-and-videos-from-email-messages-mms-messages-and-webpages

Making an image your iPhone Wallpaper

http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#photos.wallpaper

We thank La Condesa and all participating chefs, farmers, food artisans and FÖDA STUDIO, inc. for making the upcoming November 8th SFC Chef Series launch possible! Don’t have tickets yet? Click HERE to snag some before they’re gone.

Primizie Osteria Celebrates 2nd Anniversary with Homage to Sicily

I had the amazing good fortune to attend a dinner last night at Primizie Osteria celebrating the East End restaurant’s second anniversary.  Owners Mark and Lisa Spedale hosted the convivial event which highlighted dishes and techniques garnered during their recent 9-day trip to the island of Sicily and the smaller island of Salina, featuring the bounty of local foods.  The Spedales have been generous SFC supporters and hearty advocates of local farmers and ranchers.

 

Items on the Local Specials Menu include both traditional Sicilian preparations and Sicilian-inspired creations.  Each dish sampled offered flavor layers that work perfectly together making each bite a fork symphony.  “Primizie Osteria will offer the Sicilian menu through the end of this year and showcase another Italian region starting in January,” said Mark.

 

The Spedales commitment to palate-tantalizing preparations while feting the pure flavors of the freshest of fresh ingredients shone through last night.  Steaming bowls of Zuppa di Pesce were presented family style accompanied by toothsome garlic focaccia, perfect for lapping up the luscious Limoncello broth.  Gulf seafood from San Miguel Seafood featured prominently throughout the evening.  In this case, Gulf head-on plump shrimp, grouper and red snapper snuggled beside tender bits of calamari, black mussels, and little neck clams- all enveloped in that complex broth.  Garnishing the dish were chewy yet crisp, thin, deep-fried lemon slices that cleansed the palate between bites.

 

My lucky dining companion (i.e., my husband) and I continued with seafood entrees once again featuring Gulf fish from San Miguel Seafood.  I delighted in a perfect pan roasted Gulf Scamp grouper over a seared chickpea fritter – crisp on the outside, creamy inside, slices of flavorful Italian cucuzza squash, scattered Sicilian green and black olives, and dotted with earthy squid ink.

 

Sauteed Gulf red snapper was the centerpiece of my husband’s entrée surrounded by blood orange supremes, braised fennel, caramelized Italian onions, and bacon-wrapped fried potatoes.  The light flavors lyrically played with one another, but those dang bacon-wrapped potatoes stole my heart.

 

Farther down the table, I spied a fellow diner raising to his mouth a perfectly pink Loncito’s lamb chop.  This smart man obviously did not want to risk missing a morsel using mere fork and knife.

 

Others tucked into rosemary roasted young heirloom half chicken and a simple penne pasta tossed in a pomodoro sauce and topped with generous slices of aubergine golden fried in Texas Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

 

Lisa shared with me a taste of her Spaghetti con Bottarga, dressed in Texas Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Italian parsley, peperoncino, caramelized garlic, Salina Island fried caper berries and shaved Sicilian salt cured tuna roe.  The couple brought back from Italy the tuna roe, an item I had never before sampled.  It had a surprisingly delicate texture and was flavorful without being overly salty.

 

Mark prepares house made Italian Sausage using a family recipe.  Lisa pointed out the formidable, bright red painted sausage grinder perched on a ledge in the corner of the restaurant.  Fondly referred to as “The Pig”, the Spedales found that this relic of a grinder out-performed any of the newer varieties they encountered.

 

Dessert was a melt-in-your-mouth semolina almond cake topped with toasted almond gelato and flavorful chocolate-dipped honeycomb; a pistachio cannolo served on the side.  The honey and comb are sourced from Livingston, Texas with the resulting chocolate-honeycomb combo the creation of Mark and Primizie’s pastry chef.

 

The meal ended with Limoncello toasts to Mark, Lisa, and executive sous chef Chris Dragna.

 

The beauty of a Primizie meal is to rise from the table with a palate that has been stimulated by a beautiful marriage of flavors along with a belly that has been generously sated but not stuffed.  Food Heaven a la Siciliana. 

 

I do want to note that Primizie offers close proximity to downtown, patio dining, reservations, and ample parking – a real plus for central city dining.

 

Thank you Mark and Lisa for sharing your gifts while supporting so many area producers. 

 

Featured Local Products used by Primizie:

 

Wateroak Farm – Full Quiver Dairy Farm – San Miguel Seafood – Pedernales Valley Farm – Texas Olive Ranch – Burgundy Beef – McCall Creek Farm – W Farm & Ranch – Pure Luck Far and Dairy – Loncito’s Lamb – Texas Quail Farm – Animal Farm – G & S Groves – Oak Hill Farms

She Threw a Party and SFC Came!

After having spent an evening with SFC at the FRESH screening hosted by Boggy Creek Farm and sponsored by Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow, Edible Austin, the Front Porch Project and many others who shared their time and talent, guest Mindy Cooper had an idea.

Susan and Mindy Draw the Lucky Winners!

She was marking a milestone birthday in September, and thought, “why don’t I celebrate my birthday by raising funds for a cause I care about?” Mindy rallied friends and supporters, garnering many raffle-prize donations from local businesses such as Paula’s Texas Spirits and Greenling. She encouraged her guests to bring a prepared dish made from as many local, seasonal ingredients as possible.

Sunday was a beautiful, mild evening and we all enjoyed lots of locally grown food and fellowship under the trees at LandInteractive.

Enjoying Themselves AND Benefiting a Healthy, Local Food System!

Let’s review, class: What have we learned at Mindy’s party?

a) raising hundreds of dollars to benefit those in our community without access to fresh, affordable food is fun and relatively easy.

b) SFC’s mission is the perfect cause with which to rally your troops, because EVERYONE eats – and more of us are beginning to care about where our food comes from every day.

c) When SFC rocks your birthday, cocktail, office or pirate party, you WIN.

d) All of the above.

(Answer: D!)

A huge thanks goes to Mindy Cooper and her generous guests, Sara Partridge, U-Clique Studio, all the local businesses who donated!

The Latest Buzz–Soda Tax

To tax or not to tax?

That is the latest buzz surrounding the beverage industry. The “soda tax,” as it has been nicknamed, would tax sugary beverages such as sodas, some juices and sports drinks to dissuade Americans from consuming them. And why a soda tax? Health advocates around the country from California to New York worry that the widespread consumption of sugary beverages are adding to the diet-related disease epidemic (little, if any, of these products contain any nutritional value). A recent study published by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy and a policy research group at UCLA found that 41 percent of children (ages 2 – 11), 62 percent of adolescents (ages 12 – 17) and 24 percent of adults drink at least one soda or other sugar-sweetened beverage every day. Regardless of income or ethnicity, adults who drink one or more sodas or other sugar-sweetened beverages every day are 27 percent more likely to be overweight or obese. Even the American Heart Association is urging people to reduce their intake of sugary foods and beverages in order to lower the risk factors for heart disease.

But would such a tax even work? Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, thinks that such a tax would have “a modest effect on consumption but would generate billions of dollars that could be used to mount public health campaigns.”

Of course all of the buzz has left the beverage industry on the defensive. When Muhtar Kent, the chief executive of Coca-Cola, was asked about the tax, he responded by calling it “outrageous.” He went on to say, “I have never seen it work where a government tells people what to eat and what to drink….It if worked, the Soviet Union would still be around.”

The beverage industry created an organization called Americans Against Food Taxes. On its Web site, nofoodtaxes.com, the group calls itself “a coalition of concerned citizens” opposed to “the government’s proposed tax hike on food and beverages,” including soda and juice drinks. The New York Times reported that calls to a media contact listed on the site reach the American Beverage Association, an industry organization whose board is made up of top executives from the major soft drink manufacturers.

Hmmmmm. Concerned citizens or corporate interests?

What I especially find interesting on the Americans Against Food Taxes website is the emphasis on education: Even the science shows that education, not taxation, is the key to reducing obesity and improving public health. However, time after time, the food and beverage industry has influenced the educational resources and campaigns available to the public regarding healthy living. Take for example the USDA Food Guide Pyramid—the food, meat and dairy industry fought tooth and nail regarding what it would “allow” the USDA to recommend consumers eat. And with all of the research that supports the health benefits of breast feeding to baby and mother, have you ever wondered why there is not a nationwide campaign (a la “Milk Does a Body Good”) that promotes breast feeding? Something tells me that the infant formula companies have something to do with this.

 I’d like to refer back to Mr. Kent’s quote regarding government involvement. What puzzles me is the notion that the government does not already tell us what to eat. Between 1995 and 2006, the USDA awarded over $1.2 billion in corn subsidies in Texas alone. Essentially the government is telling us what to eat by artificially lowering the cost to produce corn which then, in turn, contributes to the thousands of processed foods that use corn as an ingredient.

Other opponents of a soda tax argue that it is a regressive tax that would unjustly burden the poor. On the contrary, any funds generated could be directly invested in education to promote healthier lifestyles.

So, I’ll leave it there….unresolved for you to ponder…to tax or not to tax?

To read more, visit these sites:

www.foodpolitics.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/business/17soda.html?ref=business

 http://farm.ewg.org/farm/region.php?fips=48000

http://www.nofoodtaxes.com/

 http://www.slate.com/id/2228713/pagenum/all/#p2

Quiz: Recycling as You Like It!

Thanks in advance for your participation in this survey!  The Austin Farmers’ Market (a project of Sustainable Food Center) wants to start a new practice of recycling more, greening more and wasting less.  To help them better prepare, please click here to take a few minutes to answer some questions which will be of great importance in shaping our recycling program at AFM. Thanks again!

Live from The Happy Kitchen…

This morning, our own Joy Casnovsky, program director of The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre™ appeared on Fox7 as part of National Cholestoral Month.  Joy’s cooking demo of Salmon Patties emphasized incorporating fresh vegetables into a good source of lean protein, and the ease with which home cooks can prepare whole grains such as quinoa. Click here to catch the demo and accompanying recipe:

FRESH: a fabulous evening with friends

Last night, Boggy Creek Farm hosted a fundraiser for SFC co-sponsored by Edible Austin, Alamo Drafthouse and The Front Porch Project. Fun was had by all and we even got a few sprinkles! (Rain, that is, not cupcake variety).

We are so grateful not only for the generosity of the sponsors, but for the many community partners – from nonprofits to local business – who came out to celebrate FRESH, a wonderful film about our food system, and share in the evening’s festivities. Thank you also to the farmers and vendors who donated so much to make last night possible!

John Bullington and Trish Eichelberger of Alamo are two of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know in Austin – not to mention two of the best CHEFS. Let’s hear it for them and the Rolling Roadshow staff who put on a seamless production – not only having to wrap and unwrap the equipment when rain seemed imminent, but premiering a truly outstanding film in the best setting possible.

Farmer David Pitre of Tecolote, Austin American-Statesman food writer, Addie Broyles, SFC Executive Director Ronda Rutledge and Austin Farmers’ Market Director Suzanne Santos enjoying one another’s company at FRESH.

Click here to view all the other photos on Flickr!

Is there a correlation between increased BMI and food stamp use?

According to a recent study there is. The study, conducted by Patricia Smith of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State,  appears in the current issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology.

Even after controlling for other factors that have been linked to obesity (like poverty, race, education and community) ”the link between food stamp use and higher weight remained clear, especially for women.”

Shocked by the findings, Zagorsky ”said policymakers should aim at changing the types of food that program participants purchase…. In addition, recipients who purchase fresh fruit and vegetables and other low-fat products could be given more benefits or receive discounts on these products.”

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090810122139.htm

Food Safety Enhancement Act Passes

via FoodandWaterWatch.org

The Food Safety Enhancement Act (H.R. 2749) passed on July 29, 2009 in the U.S. House of Representatives  by a vote of 283-142.  The bill gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration new mandates and authority to regulate food safety of the 80% of the food supply that falls under its jurisdiction.  The legislation addresses some of the gaping loopholes in the food safety program at FDA that were tragically exposed by a series of food borne illness outbreaks in recent years that sickened and even killed U.S. consumers.  On balance, the bill is a positive first step to correcting the deficiencies at FDA, but there are still some issues that need to be addressed as the debate moves over to the Senate.

Note: as the Kaptur-Farr Amendment did not pass along with the bill, SFC reserves judgment until which point the Senate has addressed concerns specific to the plight of small to mid-sized farmers.