Slow Food: A Baker In The Family

One of the great rewards of baking for yourself is knowing exactly what ingredients are in your food; you can choose organic, unbleached, whole-grain, and locally-grown flours. You can compensate for special dietary needs, like our household's need to be completely peanut- and nut-free. You can get adventurous and experiment with loaves usually not found at your local bakery.

pretzels

rustic whole grain sourdough loaf

garlic and French onion ciabatta

whole wheat cheese and mustard loaf

green tea sweet buns

If you're as lucky as I am, you have a partner who does it for you, just for fun, every weekend, and the only drawback is the occasional need to clean sourdough snot starter out of the sink. My husband finds it relaxing and is becoming fairly accomplished as a baker, as you can see from the photos above of his work. He's particularly proud of his green tea sweet buns, which were inspired by the ones we ate on our trip to Japan and adapted from a regular bread roll recipe, and the pretzels, which took him forever to perfect. His beer pretzel recipe was posted on his blog a while back.

Today is Blog Action Day 2011, and the topic is food - not slow food, but hunger and famine. I'm not going to write extensively about it; I just wanted to express gratitude for how extraordinarily fortunate we are as North Americans when it comes to our food security. We are blessed to even be able to nitpick over where our food comes from. I also wanted to point out that the slow food movement isn't as divorced from food insecurity as you might think, and link out to a few great posts from today.

{Food insecurity is defined magnificently in the Red Cross UK video in this BAD11 post - please go watch it. 

Agencies like the Red Cross who are working to increase the resilience of at-risk communities need our unwavering support.} 

By growing and making your own food, and supporting local farmers and CSAs and farmers markets and grocery delivery services, and going to locally-owned restaurants where the chefs specialize in local ingredients, you actually help to ensure the food security of your community should hard times ever come. You help to control the global rise in food prices. Also, by reducing the amount of food you are importing from elsewhere, you reduce your food's carbon footprint. By supporting slow food projects in other communities - like the projects championed in this blog post - you bring those benefits to developing and at-risk nations. Choosing slow food is a small step in the right direction, but cumulatively our choices can make a huge difference.

Monthly Slow News Summary: October 2011

On Slow Food:

• Mark Bittman is brilliant as usual in his NYT column Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
• Slow Food USA's $5 Challenge is still rolling - check out their blog for the summary of September 17th's event, and the announcement of events at The White House (Nov 29th) and on World Food Day (Oct 16th), then follow the links to find lots of inspirational ways to make healthy meals from inexpensive local ingredients.
• Bis-phenol A in canned foods is back in the science news, and the news isn't good.
• A new study from Ohio State University suggests that a city such as Cleveland could meet all of its food needs through urban agriculture on currently vacant lots.
• The Nation has published a series of articles on the food movement by Frances Ford Lappe, Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser - fascinating stuff. (You will need to sign up in order to read some of them.) I especially enjoyed Schlosser's point that it's not just about food, it's about social justice and putting a check on corporate power.
• The slow food movement has become so powerful that a number of Big Ag players have formed the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance in an effort to help shape the conversation.
• Slow Mama's Zoe Saint-Paul offered great advice on how to bring the farmer's market to your neighborhood. 

via Cracked: "That loaf and the chopping block have an equal wood content."

• Even Cracked think processed foods are a bad idea: The Six Most Horrifying Lies The Food Industry Is Feeding You. (Wait, there are more than six?)

On Slow Travel:

• The Bankok Post reports that Thailand's tourist authority is basing its newest campaign on the principles of slow travel, with the aim of promoting tourism in the northern provinces of the country.
• The writers behind hidden europe and the Slow Travel Manifesto recommended we try the narrow-gauge steam trains through the Harz Mountains of Germany.
• You simply must visit Irene Turner's blog and page through her sumptuous descriptions of her recent travels in Switzerland and France's Loire Valley.
• GreenFutures examine how slow travel could make religious pilgrimages both more planet-friendly and more fulfilling and introduces the Green Pilgrim Cities network.

On Slow Fashion:

• Here's a neat project that can use your votes daily for the next couple of weeks: Resizing Fashion's Footprint Canada.
• Fashionizing.com have announced that the new luxury is a curated wardrobe, and they'll be publishing a guide to help you choose quality over quantity.
• The ideas behind slow fashion also got an airing in The Utne Reader and The Atlantic.
• Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that increases in the cost of cotton (due largely to weather-related crop failures) and labour and shipping costs have resulted in dramatically increased clothing costs, and muses that this means the end of fast fashion.
• Slow Fashion Forward shared some information on how natural indigo dyeing works. (Really? The plant is fermented? That is so cool!)
• Happy blogiversary, SlowFashioned! At the link they have a roundup of their best & brightest moments of the past year.
• Ecouterre pointed out a neat online tool that calculates your wardrobe's environmental footprint.

On Slow Living:

• The Nation's Ben Adler examines the pros and cons of The Rise of Urban Cycling.
• The amazing concept behind Slow Money got some more press in the San Franscisco Chronicle and on Rodale.
• Zen Habits published an interesting post on slowing down your day by 'starting slow'.
• SlowBurbs' Pamela Price wrote about the bittersweet experience of letting go of stuff when it's emotionally loaded.
• Create The Good Life! introduce us to the permaculture concept of edge, and explain how to apply it to thinking about our time. 
• Deanna Duke posted a brilliant list of her top urban homesteading tools at Crunchy Chicken. I'd argue most of these are great slow living tools, too.
• Slow Mama's Ann Waterman posted a meditative piece on dinnertime rituals. LOVE the idea of using a bell instead of bellowing, "Soup's ON!"

via Simple Organic

• Emily McClements had a great piece on Simple Organic on finding ways to overcome information overload and seek out inspiration and encouragement on your green journey. I'd add going to local green events and meeting new people to her list - I always leave Green Drinks Edmonton feeling recharged and inspired.

On Slow Design:

• I love the idea behind this London shop.
• Slow Mama's Leah Moss discusses how choosing natural materials over synthetics will Help Your Home to Age Gracefully.
• Gloria Battista-Collins reminds us what Slow Home is *really* all about in her essay, Remember The Meat Ball. 
• The Slow Tech exhibit of experimental designs at London Design Festival is recapped on Protein.

via l-mh.com

• Also shown at London Design Festival was Lies-Marie Hoffmann's "Homage To The Elm Trees" (found via Inhabitat). What a stunning example of slow design! The butterfly joints make me weak-kneed - and wouldn't you love to see something similar made from the boulevard trees your city has lost to disease?

Slow Fashion: A Working Vintage Wardrobe

It's October, and that means the thrift shops that don't usually have older vintage clothing will pull iconic pieces out of their storage and hang them for sale in their costume section. I can see why - sometimes older clothes can look very costumey - but styled with modern pieces, or even vintage pieces from other eras, they look chic instead. Older pieces also usually have the advantage of having been carefully constructed by skilled seamstresses in unionized North American workshops from high-quality materials.

I'm starting to build a respectable wardrobe of basic vintage pieces to mix with my modern clothing. So far for accessories, I have a great navy blue '50s frame bag, a porkpie hat and a wool felt beret, a solid collection of brightly-coloured '20s-to-'70s bakelite and lucite bangles, and some older necklaces and brooches that came my way from my mom and grandmothers. Most of my 'vintage' clothes are less authentic: a 90s-repro mod dress that looks fab with leggings, some sweet velvet or tweed blazers of indeterminate age, the 30s-style knit accordion pleat skirt and 40s-esque high-waisted trousers I bought at Winners this week. When I'm thrifting, I mostly shop for my kids (because I have them with me), so my daughter has a much more impressive collection than I do (with her 60s and 70s sundresses, embroidered Portuguese peasant blouse, full-circle square dancers' skirt trimmed with ricrac, and pink multilayer tulle petticoat). However, the other day I scored these two beauties:

...a Canadian-union-made Edwardian-style ruff-neck puffed-sleeve blouse that can be worn as intended, or back-to-front for an interesting keyhole effect, probably made in the 1970s; and a 1960s-or-70s-era full-length swiss dot slip. Both are super soft poly-cotton blends. I think I'll try to find a way to wear them to today's Tweed Ride. (Yes, it's hours away and I have no clue what I am wearing for it!) (Update: I ended up not wearing these because they're better suited to warm weather - I'll keep them in mind for the planned springtime Tweed seersucker social.)

To make all of these part of my working wardrobe, of course, I need to actually find ways to wear them for everyday, as well. Of course there's a whole world of vintage fashion blogs out there to explore for inspiration, and I'm just starting to dive into it. Here are a handful of resources I think I'll find pretty useful; the first few talk more about classic vintage shapes and how they were worn back-in-the-day, and most of the rest talk more about fitting them into a modern wardrobe. (I've updated this list as I've found more great information; newly added links are in italics.)

• Va Voom Vintage's whole darn blog, but especially her brilliant Building A Vintage Wardrobe series (I've only linked to the crucial first post), the other resources listed on her tutorials page, and her free patterns page
• Sammy Davis Vintage's list of books for learning about vintage fashion & style
• Bombshell Bettie's Vintage's blog post Building A Midcentury Wardrobe
• Mademoiselle Robot's spring/summer vintage wardrobe basics post
• Night Owl Vintage's care and cleaning advice
• Past Perfect Vintage's building a vintage wardrobe post for her mix-it-up approach
• Stylist Lisa Tubarello's rules for incorporating vintage into your wardrobe
• Sammy Davis' great advice for bringing vintage into your workplace wardrobe
• Andrea Eames' advice on incorporating vintage into a modern wardrobe, with links to a few (adorable!) style bloggers who specialize in it
• For the boys: advice from Dress That Man. (Apparently good-condition vintage menswear is pretty rare. Who knew?)
• Slow Fashioned's Spotting Fake Vintage 101 and How To Spot Quality Details
• Tangerine Boutique's advice on Choosing A Vintage Silhouette that works for your figure
• Simple Design's post on Looking Modern While Wearing Vintage