Pat’s turkeys and a thanksgiving dinner, slow food style.

This weekend, Slow Food is helping the Pats Pastured crew with their turkey processing. This Saturday, November 17th we will meet at the Memorial Union at 8:00 am to head to Pat’s. We will work there until we’re no longer needed, then head back to campus. Cate and Alyssa can give rides, or you can meet us there! The farm is located on 830 South Road in East Greenwich. Its a beautiful farm, and Pat and his crew do a wonderful job at raising the animals. It is definitely worthwhile to take part in the process of bringing our thanksgiving turkeys to the table.

On Sunday the 18th, we are getting together with the outing club to have our annual potluck thanksgiving dinner! Pat is donating a turkey, and everyone is welcome to bring a dish to share. The dinner will be held in the Eddy Hall Lounge. There is a small kitchen with an oven if you need to heat up your dish! Everyone remember to bring utensils, a cup, plate, bowl, and friends! Last year’s dinner was delicious! Hope to see you there!

Check out the Pats Pastured Website and Facebook for info and great pictures!

Cate’s Pickling Party!

Earlier this fall, Cate organized a Pickling party at her house to preserve some yummy veggies harvested this summer! Everyone collected a bunch of jars and spices from various people, and Cate supplied vinegar and cucumbers. One of Cate’s friends brought 6 boxes of tomatoes from the URI agronomy farm. Another person brought green beans, jalapenos and tomatoes from his garden. Emma brought tomatoes and basil from her garden. They pickled radishes, cucumbers and even blueberries! They also made a large vat of tomato basil tomato sauce. To keep em’ going during the process, the slow foodies munched on rice and beans as well as some horseradish wasabi cheese. It was a great time for everyone involved! Take a look at the yumalicious pics…

Third Meeting of the Year!

Hope to see you at our  meeting this Thursday, October 4 at 5pm in the 193 Coffee House, (located upstairs in the Memorial Union!

It’s finally fall, that beautiful time of year at URI perfect for our Local Food Market on the Quad!

Hey everyone! I’m Emily, and I’ll be blogging for Slow Food this Year!

Now that everyone is into the swing of this years fall semester, its definitely time to start enjoying some local slow food on the Quad. Although the awesome vendors certainly do a good job at serving up their yummy slow-food quick enough for us to grab in between classes!

The Coffee Guy’s Cold Brew is perfect for that crazy buzzy day when you need a pick me-up after lunch, and you can also get a cup of his hot coffee for just buck! Can’t beat it. My personal favorite is his refreshing iced-chai. Definitely remember your reusable mugs on Tuesdays to make sure you get a good amount of his brews while being kind to the earth. Then there’s the crowd pleasing Talulah’s Tacos, who uses awesome local ingredients from Pats Pastured and Schartner Farms! I highly recommend getting there early, before they sell out! Don’t forget the Great Harvest Bread Co. who I’m pretty sure sells the BEST chocolate-chip cookies ever.

Today I enjoyed 2 delicious pieces of Bravo Wood Fired pizza. Great option when you can’t scrounge up enough change, because they take cards using that handy-dandy new I-Phone app! Crazy right? But totally awesome.  I got a slice of kalamata olive and caramelized onion (yum!) pizza, and another of mushroom, red pepper, and caramelized onions. They always have such a great variety of toppings to choose from, and you just gotta love that portable wood-fired oven! How cool is that?! Of course, I had to wash my pizza down with an iced-chai. Delish!

We hope to see you at the market next Tuesday from 11-2pm, or better yet, every Tuesday until the last week in October!

Slow Food URI’s Local Food Markets – Spring Series

Sun, blooming trees, fresh rain, sprouts and the teasing feeling that school is almost out… What could be better?

We’ll tell you; this spring Slow Food URI has successfully implemented Local Food Markets on the university quad and that means some damn good food at your fingertips every single Wednesday from 11:00am to 3:00pm.

With vendors like Tallulah’s Tacos (above), The Coffee Guy (below), Great Harvest Bread Co., Bravo Wood-fired Pizza, Absolona Green House, Farming Turtles and many more how can you go wrong?

You can’t. Plus, where else can you find perfect Boston Bibb lettuce? You can’t do that either! Absolona Greenhouse (below) grows their produce hydroponically – pretty nifty if you ask us.

After the first market we had to celebrate our success and what better way to do so than to play in the soil while frying up some  Rhody inspired Johnnycakes? Bob, one of our slow food guys (plant romanticist) claimed to be a pro at flipping the little flint-corn cakes so we challenged him to work griddle. Well, let’s just say he was so thrilled that he got dressed up for the occasion (see below). Now that is love to your native food (although we caught wind of a rumor he isn’t from RI but from Austria. Hmmm, Austrian Johnnycakes?).

The johnnycakes were traditional and perfect in every way and the RI harvested syrup enhanced the griddled patties for those of us who have a sweet tooth (myself included). Cate seasoned her johnnycakes with the soil from her hands (see below, Cate is in red with brown hands and is making an a very attractive face). Yikes.

It was a phenomenal day. After all, what do you expect when people gather around food; only the best, right? Yup, And the good news doesn’t stop there, the URI community likes the Local Food Markets so much that we’ve been approved to hold weekly markets in the fall. Maybe we’ll get some of our produce in there to share with the public!

Stick around and watch Slow Food URI and all the dedicated Slowfoodists take over the University of Rhode Island!

-Alyssa

SFURI

Thanks to everyone who created this eclectic banner and especially to Elena for spearheading it.

Thanksgiving Dinner in Eddy Hall

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The Slow Food URI gang paired up with the Outing Club for the third year in a row to enjoy a night of local feasting! Everyone made a Thanksgiving dish: entrees, sides and desserts. Some of the ingredients came right from the Slow Food campus garden! The butternut squash for the pies, radishes for the salad. Agronomy at the bottom of the campus donated carrots. A turkey was donated from Pat’s Pasture, a local farm and nicely cooked by Alyssa. The room was filled with laughter, giggles, chatter and sounds of utensils hitting plates. Even though this was my last Thanksgiving dinner with Slow Food URI and The Outing Club, I will look back at these times with happy thoughts. When Slow Food was just beginning as a club back in 2009, this was one of our first events and it was nice to have shared it with another campus club. I hope this tradition with The Outing Club continues!

-Maria

Go Fair Trade Chocolate!

With Halloween just around the corner, Slow Food couldn’t help but be thinking about sweets. This week, Maria, Doug, and I ran a table in the Memorial Union to educate students about the importance of buying fair trade items. Given the time of year we decided to focus on chocolate. If you aren’t familiar with what fair trade is, you may have noticed some specialty food items that have started to bear the Fair Trade stamp and wondered what it meant. In short, fair trade works towards creating a sustainable global economic system. It ensures that the payment of producers in developing countries is fair, in an effort to support the rights of worker’s, eliminate poverty, and protect the environment.

Taza Chocolate, an organic and fair trade chocolate company from Somerville, MA was nice enough to donate samples of a few varieties of their chocolate to Slow Food URI. Taza goes about making their chocolate in a very unique way. They not only produce their chocolate straight from the bean using a traditional method of stone grinding, but they’ve hand selected cooperatives to work with in Mexico, Costa Rica, and the DR that grow cacao sustainably and organically. Lastly, as a part of their Direct Trade principles, Taza made it a commitment to maintain direct relationships with their cacao producers, to only purchase cacao beans from producers using fair and humane work practices, and to pay their cacao farmers a minimum of 500 US Dollars/metric ton more than the current NYBOT price for cacao beans. There isn’t a step of their process that they didn’t put a lot of thought into. Visit Taza’s website to read the story about how their passion to create a socially responsible chocolate bar using traditional techniques began: http://www.tazachocolate.com/AboutUs



Also of interest to us Slow Foodies, was the fact that Taza’s technique of stone grinding (and minimal processing) helps to keep the health benefits of the cacao beans in tact. This process also gives their chocolate a unique texture. Chocolate is often touted for offering a host of health benefits to those who indulge. However, for all you chocolate lovers out there, be aware that your average chocolate bar has been through so many steps of processing that most of the vitamins and minerals that were once present have been lost along the way. But, as I’m sure you are gathering by now, Taza makes anything but your average chocolate bar.  Lastly, their chocolate is dairy, soy and gluten free! So vegans – have at it! If you’re not vegan, buy some for your friends that are lactose intolerant or have Celiac Disease. Or, simply consider handing out some socially responsible chocolate this year for Halloween.

To learn more about Fair Trade and to seek out other businesses that are sourcing their products in a socially responsible way, check out Fair Trade USA’s webpage: http://www.fairtrade.net/products.html

-Charlotte

Food Day Celebration

We enjoyed some very beautiful fall weather as a group on Monday while apple picking.  We were able to pick from a few varieties such as Macouns, Macintosh, and Courtland…..  The Courtland apples were bright shiny red after wiping the coating off of the apple.  Biting into the shiny peel with a loud crunch revealed the meat of the apple bursting with a crisp flavor.  When you go apple picking, I highly suggest these apples for snacking on.  We picked these apples for our Food Day apple taste test that was held on Thursday, October 20th on the quad at URI.  Slow Food URI  hosted a farmers market from 11-2.  The following vendors joined us in our celebration of Food Day:  The Coffee Guy, Good Harvest, Tallulah Taco, Bravo Pizza and Like No Udder. 

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URI students flooded the quad visiting and purchasing some yummy goods from the venders. Students also visited our Slow Food booth where they participated in our taste test.  They had to try a piece of an apple from the supermarket Stop and Shop and then try a piece of the apple we picked from the farm.  They had to tell us which apple they enjoyed more, and which one they thought was local.  The competition of which apple was better were neck and neck…and we were surprised. Some comments people made about the local apples were:  juicy, sweet, firm, crisp.  Comments made about the apples from Stop and Shop were weird, sour, tart, juicy, tangy, mushy/not as crisp,sweet.  While we were expecting everyone to LOVE the local apples, it really depended on the individual’s apple preference, if they liked sweet vs sour or mushy vs crisp apples.  We enjoyed performing this little experiment while informing students about the importance local food.  Hope you celebrated Food Day and enjoyed it!

-Maria

Pizza In the Garden

Hey Slow Foodies!

We had a great meeting in our garden at the Watson House.  Alyssa brought along a grill and some pizza dough and we all brought some scrumptious toppings to put on our grilled pizzas.  Some toppings were: basil, tomatoes, chicken and hen of the woods(fungi),  artichokes hearts, olives, Gouda cheese and peppers from our garden :).  While we waited for the pizzas to grill, Megan, the grad student that lives in the Watson House gave us a tour of the house!  The house and the farm land were sold to URI in 1888 by Oliver Watson and the is the oldest structure on campus dating back to around 1790.  I am so thrilled to have our garden there :).  A few weeks ago we planted again to start a winter garden.  We are growing radishes, carrots, spinach and turnips.  The radishes have already sprouted!  Soon we will have to cover the garden ground to prevent the plants from freezing.

Slow Food URI is pretty busy this semester between the garden and some other events coming up.  On October 20th there is a farmers market on the URI quad and we will be holding a booth there from 10-2 to give out some Slow Food information and do an apple tasting in celebration of Food Day!  Then on October 27th, we will be holding another booth from 10-2 in the union promoting Fair Trade and handing out Fair Trade chocolate.

So stop by and see us!

Happy Columbus Day Weekend!  And we will meet next Monday the 17th at 4…not sure if our meeting will be held at the garden due to colder weather.  Look for an email!

-Maria