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May 21, 2012
Events: Sausage and Opera Festival in Elgin, Austin Wine & Music heads to Driftwood, benefit for Gatti's GM killed in MetroRail accident
Only a couple of new openings this week, but a ton of events around the Memorial Day weekend….
• Open: My Fit Foods, the fifth location of the prepared foods company at 12415 N. I-H 35 near Tech Ridge, the former home of Bennigan’s. This location is the 50th for the company that started five years ago in Houston.
• Closing Monday: After 40 years in business, the Gatti’s Pizza location at 503 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. will close its doors for good May 28. Efforts to negotiate a new lease with the building’s landlord failed, according to vice president of operations Mike Glenn. Six other Central Texas Gatti’s Pizza buffets will remain open, the Austin-based company said. The restaurant is full of University of Texas photos, posters and art, which are being auctioned off to help the family of Jeremy Barta, general manager of the restaurant who was killed in an accident on April 30 at a Capital MetroRail crossing. Click here to see and bid on the items.
UPCOMING FOOD & WINE EVENTS
• Olive & June, 3411 Glenview Ave., is hosting two five-course gluten-free dinners this week in honor of Celiac Awareness Month that will feature scallops, grilled prawns, antipasti and even gluten-free spaghetti. Tickets for the dinners on Wednesday and Thursday ($80, including wine, tax and gratuity) and reservations at 467-9898 or online.
• Homefield Grill, 2000 S. IH-35 in Round Rock, is hosting a five-course bacon-themed beer dinner ($49.95) at 7 p.m. Thursay. Call 512-388-4663 for reservations.
• Elgin is known for its sausage, but opera? Not so much. The Austin-based non-profit Franco-American Vocal Academy has teamed up with the city of Elgin for the first Sausage and Opera Festival from 6 to 10 p.m. on Saturday at the Elgin Depot Square, 310 North Main Street. The free event will feature a variety of Elgin’s famous sausages, including a special “opera sausage” created exclusively for the event, as well as a performance of La Perichole from Franco-American Vocal Academy singers and a chamber orchestra.
• Fall Creek Vineyards, 1820 County Road 222 in Tow, is hosting a luncheon at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday followed by an afternoon of live music with guitarist and singer Bill Rives. Reservations for lunch ($24.95 for adults, $19.95 for children) at (325) 379-5361 or online.
• Organizers of the Austin Wine & Music Festival, which in previous years has taken place over the course of several days at the Domain, have decided to take the event on the road this year, starting with an event on Sunday at Driftwood Estate Winery. From 1 to 7 p.m. Sunday, you can try wines from Duchman Family Winery and Wimberley Valley Winery, enjoy music from Jeff Wood and Bret Graham and try food from Fired Up Kitchen, a food trailer specializing in wood-fired pizza, and Dripping Springs’ Sunrise Cafe. The next event is a tailgate on Sept. 29 at Spicewood Vineyards, followed by a November gathering at Flat Creek Estate. After two additional events next spring at Stone House Vineyard and Pillar Bluff Vineyards, the 2013 Austin Wine & Music Festival will return to the Domain. Tickets for Sunday’s event ($25) and information on the website.
• Amy’s Ice Creams has teamed up with Tito’s Handmade Vodka to create a specialty flavor called The Dude, and to celebrate, they are hosting a free launch party with live music and samples from 5 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday at the Amy’s at 5624 Burnet Road.
• Aviary Lounge, the boutique wine lounge and furniture store at 2110 S. Lamar Blvd. is hosting its next Cork Dork Night at 8 p.m. May 31, which will feature six wines from Duchman Family Winery in Driftwood that will be paired with traditional Texas fare. You can find out more at 916-4445, and you can RSVP for tickets ($40) by emailing marco@aviarydecor.com.
Photos from My Fit Foods’ Facebook page and Trace.
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March 26, 2012
Foodways Texas Symposium: Preserving the Rich Culture of Drinking in the South
Foodways Texas, the nonprofit created “to preserve, promote, and celebrate the diverse food cultures of Texas,” hosted its second annual symposium in Austin last weekend with a series of speakers and dinners that explored the theme of preservation. This is a condensed version of a longer post by Emma Janzen, who has a longer recap on her Liquid Austin blog.
Houston bar owner Bobby Heugel lit up the Blanton Museum of Art auditorium on Friday with his perspective on how important it is that we strive to unearth and reclaim the largely buried history and culture of drinking in the South.
“Most of the time when we think of cocktails, we think of a Northern perspective on cocktails because it was OK to write about cocktails from the North. It wasn’t OK to write about cocktails from the South,” Heugel says. “It was something that was hidden. It wasn’t always socially acceptable.”
Whereas drinking in the South was an everyday activity before the Civil War, during reconstruction the practice became largely associated with minorities and violence, making it unseemly for white people to consume hard alcohol, and providing yet another reason for black people to be further ostracized from white society.
Also, with the impending Temperance movement, the backlash from religious groups turned what was once an everyday widespread activity into a sin. People could still drink for medicinal purposes, but cocktail consumption, if it did take place, remained a practice that was swept under the rug instead of outwardly celebrated.
It was for these reasons (among others) that we have so little information on reconstructing Southern cocktail traditions of yore today. Thankfully, there are still several things we can do to distinguish ourselves from the North and preserve our unique Southern identity through drink programs, says Heugel, who last summer created a Summer in the South cocktail menu (above).
“If you’re running cocktail programs or making cocktails in the South, or if you own a restaurant in the South that really tries to play up Southern ingredients than why not do so in your cocktails as well?” he says, “If you don’t run a cocktail bar, ask the people who do to use local ingredients, or ask them for classic cocktails from the South. Because it really is part of who you are and part of why you think about drinks the way you do.”
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Foodways Texas Symposium: The Effects of Drought on the Texas Food Supply
Foodways Texas, the nonprofit created “to preserve, promote, and celebrate the diverse food cultures of Texas,” hosted its second annual symposium in Austin last weekend with a series of speakers and dinners that explored the theme of preservation.
It’s hard to say which food industry in Texas has been hit the hardest by the drought.
When you think about the $8 billion in agricultural losses in Texas alone last year, cracked soil and cattle headed to slaughter might be the first images to pop in your mind, but the lack of rain is affecting the Gulf Coast fishing industry, too.
Galveston Bay relies entirely on the Trinity River basin, said Jim Gossen, of Louisiana Foods in Houston, at a panel on the drought at the symposium on Saturday. When those waterways dry up (and when there are “more straws” sucking from the aquifer, he pointed out), the tide — and sometimes Red Tide, if the algae are in bloom — comes in all the way to the mouth of the rivers. Last year, the water in the bay was almost as salty as in the gulf, Gossen said.
“Eighty percent of the water in the Trinity river is being used for municipalities. People need water, I understand that, but if we kill Galveston Bay, it will have a rippling effect on everything.”
“Oysters will come back in time,” Gossen said. “but I see a bigger effect on the fishermen…Instead of the few people left in the industry getting stronger because there is less competition, they are getting weaker because of all these challenges. If a guy can’t make a living fishing, he goes to work in another industry.”
Gossen said that people who get into fishing do so because it was in their families. “I don’t see any people walking in off the streets saying, ‘Hey, I want to be an oyster man.’ “
Neal Newsom, one of the state’s best known grape growers, talked about his fear of the drought pushing out the last struggling farmers in the High Plains, where he grows 130 acres of grapes.
He long ago switched to growing grapes because it requires less water than cotton and corn. “Farmers up there are becoming very interested in growing grapes,” he said. In the past few decades, Texas has become the fifth largest wine producing state and the industry is valued at $1.3 billion.
Unlike much of the rest of the state, spring rains haven’t come to the Lubbock area. “July 4, 2010 was the last significant rain in the High Plains,” Newsom said. “We still have a dust storm every few days. It’s still as brown as winter.”
But Texas’ agricultural bread and butter has always been the cattle industry, whose collective stock is at the lowest levels since the 1950s. During the worst of the drought last summer, many ranchers were either sending their cattle to slaughterhouses or to greener pastures a few states away, while others were buying hay from those same far-off greener pastures at higher prices than they thought possible.
“The cattle that have moved may never come back,” said Jeff Savell, a professor at Texas A&M University. “My fear is that we are going to have challenges rebuilding the herds. It’s more lucrative in places like the Hill Country to use your land for high-end hunting.”
The average age of farmers keeps going up, and the high cost of keeping the cattle alive might drive them to quit before they would have otherwise. If there’s no one left to tend to the herds, who will keep the cattle industry alive, Savell asked.
Raymond Slade, a hydrologist in Austin, pointed out that the public perception of drought has one of the most damaging effects. The lack of rain causes more awareness, which turns to concern and then panic. But as soon as the rains come, apathy sets in and then the cycle starts all over again. He didn’t say so specifically, but the wet spring we’ve had in Central Texas has caused many people to forget that we are still in a drought and that farmers, especially those in the High Plains, which hasn’t had any rain, are still struggling.
“Nobody wants to say it, but it’s the tension between cities and country,” Newsom said. “Next time you see that development going in, ask yourself, ‘How much water is that going to take, how many farmers is that going to take out?’ “
Photo by Jay Janner for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Foodways Texas Symposium: A Short But Not Always Sweet History of Sugar in Texas
Foodways Texas, the nonprofit created “to preserve, promote, and celebrate the diverse food cultures of Texas,” hosted its second annual symposium in Austin last weekend with a series of speakers and dinners that explored the theme of preservation. Here is the first of several recaps from the event.
Food writer Mary Margaret Pack kicked off the symposium with a presentation about the state’s complex history with sugar, which is only rivaled by salt and smoke as the world’s best preservative.
It was a long road from sugar’s origins in New Guinea 8,000 years ago to the creation of Sugar Land, a company town built around the turn of the century by Imperial Sugar which in many ways marked the height of the sugar industry in Texas.
Where slaves went, sugar went, through the Caribbean and then slowing migrating north and then west through what is now the American South. Around the same time in the 1700s, sugar arrived in Texas via the Camino Real up through Mexico.
Slaves and then Texas convicts were the primary workforce for the state’s sugar boom in the mid-to-late 1800s, which was centered around the Brazos River Valley. At more than 40 major plantations, workers turned the sugar cane that grew nearby into refined sugar using a hazardous process that involved pouring gallons of boiling syrup from one pot to another.
After the Civil War ended slavery, the state of Texas leased out convicts to work for private sugar companies, but eventually, the state took them back and create working prison farms to grow crops, including sugar, to feed the inmates and generate revenue.
Pack pointed out that until the 1980s, all of the state’s prison system properties were on former farm plantations.
In the early 1900s, Imperial Sugar created a company town called Sugar Land, which was home almost exclusively to workers and their families until 1959. “Former cane fields are now upscale suburbs,” Pack said of the now almost infamously affluent town outside Houston.
Texas is now the country’s third largest sugar producer, falling behind Louisiana and Florida. (Both Imperial, which is still based in Sugar Land, and Domino, in Louisiana, claim to be the largest sugar refiners in the U.S.)
A number of sugar cane growers in South Texas have created the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers co-op, and they are working with Texas A&M to develop sugar cane that is resistant to drought and cold.
Photo by dsledge via Creative Commons on Flickr.
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February 20, 2012
Events: That Takes the Cake returns, plus a hot dog eating contest for Mardi Gras and a pub run at the Paramount
Confectionery artists (and hundreds us who are better at consuming sugar than decorating with it) will descend upon the North Austin Event Center, 10601 N. Lamar Blvd,, this weekend for the eighth annual That Takes the Cake Sugar Arts Show. Each year, the Capital Confectioners’ Cake Club, a local organization of cake bakers and sugar aficionados, brings together some of the top cake talent in the country for this two-day event that features classes, demonstrations, hands-on activities and entertainment.
Show director Jennifer Bartos, who owns the Make It Sweet cake shop in North Austin, says the theme this year is “Cake-A-Lot: Knights of the Turn Table” and that more than 500 cakes will be on display. You can buy tickets ($10 per day or $17 for a weekend pass; children under 18 are free; $1 off if you bring a nonperishable food item to donate to the Capital Area Food Bank) at the door. A portion of the proceeds will go to scholarships for local culinary students, and you can find out more on the show’s website.
Here are a few other upcoming events worth noting:
• Spicewood Vineyards is hosting its annual Pair It With Claret Chili Cook-off from 1 to 6 p.m. on Saturday at the vineyard off U.S. 71 west of Austin.
• The Butterfly Bar, the bar located next to the Vortex theater at 2307 Manor Road, is celebrating Mardi Gras with a hot dog-eating contest and a ping-pong tournament starting at 5 p.m. Tuesday. Free admission, and you can sign up by emailing butterflybaraustin@gmail.com.
• Cannoli Joe’s, 4715 Hwy 290 West, is hosting its next cooking class with chef Quirino “Q” Silva at 6:30 p.m. on Friday. Guests can enjoy a four-course meal while Silva demonstrates how to prepare each of the dishes. To reserve a space at the class, which costs $35, not including tax or gratuity, call 799-6884 or visit the website.
• Local websites VegAustin and Red Hot Vegans are hosting a vegan social hour from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday, at the Brixton, 1412 E. Sixth St. According to the website, ATX Vegan Drinks is an event for vegans and the “veg-curious” to make new friends, meet up with old ones and try the food at Arlo’s, a vegan food truck next door.
• On Saturday from 1:30 to 5 p.m., Texas Sake is hosting its “Spring is Around the Corner” Celebration with brewery tours, live music, local food vendors and Texas Sake available for purchase by the glass or bottle. 5501 N. Lamar Blvd. You can find more info here.
• Kat Edmondson and Darden Smith are performing Feb. 27 at Fino, 2905 San Gabriel St., as part of Smith’s “Be An Artist” program, in which he bring his guitar into classrooms to teach, inspire and encourage students. (He’s also adapted the lessons for corporate retreats and event to help members of the military transition back into civilian life.) Smith and Edmondson will perform alongside a multi-course meal from Fino chef Jason Donoho. Tickets ($150) or tables (starting at $600 for four) and information are available online.
• Three of Austin’s best chefs — Josh Watkins of the Carillon, Paul Petersen of Vivo and Zack Northcutt of Swift’s Attic — will compete in a “Tops In Texas Cookoff” on Tuesday, February 28, at the AT&T Executive Education & Conference Center, 1900 University Avenue. The event, which will feature “Top Chef” contestants Tre Wilcox and Arnold Myint, along with Uchi’s Tyson Cole and David Bull of Congress Austin as judges, is a benefit for the Wine & Food Foundation of Texas. Tickets ($50 or $85 for VIP) include wine, cocktails and tastings of the chefs’ dishes, as well as from local restaurants and food companies. Info and tickets here.
• IHOP’s annual tradition of giving away pancakes to raise money for charity is getting a boost this year with the backing of Governor Rick Perry and his wife, Anita, who recently commended the restaurant and Shriners in Texas, the beneficiary of the fundraiser. From 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Tuesday, February 28, guests are asked to make a donation in exchange for a plate of free pancakes, which will support the Shriners Hospitals for Children. Through this pancake day fundraiser, IHOP has helped raise almost $8 million for charity. For info, go to IHOPpancakeday.com.
• The Paramount Theater is hosting a pub run and screening of “Back to the Future” at 6:15 p.m. on Wednesday, February 29. Start the night at the Paramount Theatre, where the group will jog/run 1.1 miles to Luke’s Locker. Enjoy a pint of Thirsty Planet beer and then hike back to the Paramount for more Thirsty Planet and a screening of “Back to the Future.” Costumes encouraged; $15 covers admission to the movie and beer.
• The Natural Epicurean, a vegan and vegetarian cooking school at 1700 S. Lamar Blvd., is hosting a day-long cooking class on Saturday, March 3, about the indigenous healing foods of Mexico. Leslie Korn and Ken Rubin will be highlighting recipes from their book “Chocolate, Chilies, and Coconuts,” which is slated to come out later this year. You can sign up for the hands-on workshop, which costs $220 and includes lunch and dinner, and find other upcoming classes online.
Photo by Laura Skelding for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Food takes center stage at Southwestern University's Brown Symposium next week
For the first time in its history, the two-day event, which takes place on Monday and Tuesday, February 27 and 28, in the Alma Thomas Fine Arts Center on the campus at 1001 E. University Avenue, is dedicated to food.
In support of the theme “Back to the Foodture: Sustainable Strategies to Reverse a Global Crisis,” guests including Jo Luck, president of Heifer International, “Fast Food/Slow Food” author Richard Wilk, Native American activist Winona LaDuke and Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, will talk about the globalized food system, the rise of veganism and industrialized agriculture and innovative solutions to helping combat food shortages in various parts of the world.
Most of the speakers will present on Monday starting at 9:30 a.m. (click here for the schedule), with Luck giving a keynote on Tuesday that will be followed by an empty bowl fundraiser lunch. (Attendees are also asked to bring nonperishable food that will be donated to local food banks.)
In addition to the speakers, there will a pop-up farmers’ market from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in the Bishops Lounge on Monday, February 27. A ceramics art exhibit entitled “Culinary Cultures: A Ceramics Perspective” is on display in the Fine Arts Gallery through March 9.
In conjunction with the symposium, a group of Southwestern students has organized a free documentary film series that continues at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday with a screening of “Food Matters” in room 105 in the Olin building. At 7 p.m. March 7, they’ll host a special screening of “Fresh” in the Campus Center Ballroom that will feature a talk from Ana Joanes, who directed and produced the movie.
Symposium organizer Laura Hobgood-Oster, a professor of religion and environmental studies, said she hopes people will come away from the symposium being more thoughtful about the food they eat. “We eat as we go without considering the impact of that food on the environment or on our own bodies and our health — or the joy of food,” she says. For more information or to register, go to the symposium’s website.
Illustration by Nick Ramos.
