Here’s 4 out of the 5 menus from the Urban Eating League on Sunday for your imaginary culinary pleasure. Enjoy!

Faith, Geoff, and Lindsey’s “Homebrew” Dinner (Hotel Zorba):
1. Skewers of deep-fried sweet potato and apple with a leek walnut cream dressing.  Paired with homebrewed kombucha.

2. Stew and a Biscuit – Dried fava and cranberry bean stew (with fennel, celery, onion, leek, and soup stock made from the Divis Market juice booth scraps! garnished with fresh fava puree) with a quinoa flour cornbread slider, stuffed with roasted leeks and fennel.  Served with a “mimocha,” a mimosa of kombucha and fresh mandarin juice.

3. Birds Nest Salad – a nest of pea shoots, beet green chiffonade, and home-sprouted alfalfa, topped with mandarin slices, sunflower » Read more: Menus from Urban Eating League Round 2

Well, it’s official. We’ve spawned a monster. The Wigg Party and Apothocurious hosted round 2 of the Urban Eating League last night, and in just one month the event has grown by an order of magnitude. We upped the ante from three host sites to five, but it was really the creativity of the Eating teams that saw the biggest leap.

Homemade rosemary crackers, Bella Carpa chevre, fig compote and apple bourbon compote - No Big Deal

Whereas last time only a handful of teams brought their “A” game with costumes and skits, this version saw almost every team dress up, perform games and skits, and embark on an evening of impromptu revelry. Through the luck of the draw, I found myself escorting Team Snowpants or No Pants a.k.a. Team 4X4 Conversion Van which was decked out in snow gear and held as their mission for the evening to make it to first chair in Tahoe. While they didn’t quite find a way, they did tear up the streets of SF with some serious schussing. Ja?

Team Snowpants or No Pants

And it was truly a sight to behold when Team Snowpants or No Pants merged with Team 1/6th Asian (which also happened to be decked out in serious neon gear) at our second stop, Hotel Zorba. An impromptu skiing dance was choreographed in » Read more: Urban Eating League Round 2 Recap

The Wigg Party has entered our very first competition to try to win some money to support our growth, and we need your help! Please click on this link and vote for us in the Green Awards: http://www.THEGreenAwards.com/Default.aspx?v=176

Here’s the video we made for our submission: Morgan Fitzgibbons WIGG PARTY

If we win, we’ll receive $25,000! Runner-up gets $2,500, which isn’t too shabby either. You can vote once per day until March 27th. We’re up against some other great projects (particularly school projects – man those kids know how to get votes…) so you’re contribution is incredibly meaningful! Please vote and tell your friends. Many blessings.

We at the Wigg Party wanted to show our support for all of our brave brothers and sisters taking a stand against the treasonist policies being pushed by the far Right of American politics. Here’s what we came up with…

The Heroic Wisconsin 14

http://www.facebook.com/14Democrats

Planned Parenthood

http://www.facebook.com/PlannedParenthood

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees

http://www.facebook.com/AFSCME

AFL-CIO

http://www.facebook.com/aflcio

PBS

http://www.facebook.com/pbs

350.org

http://www.facebook.com/350.org

Stand Up for Ohio

Stand Up for Ohio

United States Environmental Protection Agency

http://www.facebook.com/EPA

Many of you may have already heard, but the Wigg Party was recently featured on an episode of the Green Scene TV. The Green Scene is a web series focused on all things green and is hosted by Brent Green. We encourage you to go check out some of their other episodes (including the one they did on Hayes Valley Farm), but here is the one featuring us:

This is a post a wrote at the request of our friends at 350.org, one of the world’s leading Climate Change-focused organizations, and the instigators of the tremendous 10/10/10 Global Day of Work for which we produced our Urban Farm Bike Tour (check the video below to learn more). The piece is part Wigg Party overview, part how-to for sustainable community organizing, and part argument for why local organizing is the single most important thing any of us can be doing right now. Enjoy!

In late 2009, a few friends and I got together and decided we needed to do something. Each of us were well aware of the various planetary crises – the onset of the sixth mass extinction, dwindling access to fresh water, incredibly unsustainable industrial agriculture practices, and, yes, the mounting dangers of global climate change, to name just a few. Each of us felt these global challenges demanded not only our awareness but some sort of action that could help win the possibility of a decent quality of life for future generations of humans. There was just one problem: these challenges were global in nature, and we were just a few friends sitting in a living room in San Francisco. How could we reasonably expect to make a dent in these planetary issues? It was then that we made an important and fateful decision that we hope will be echoed around the globe: we decided we didn’t really have a chance of changing the workings of a global society or affecting the direction of our nation, our state, or even the metropolis we call San Francisco. But we knew we were up to the task of one very important and worthy mission – we set out to make our neighborhood more sustainable and resilient. Over a year later, we’ve crafted out of that original intention an influential organization called the Wigg Party. We’ve produced a number of successful initatives and events, made a few mistakes, and have come to one very important conclusion: the future » Read more: The Wigg Party featured on 350.org

One of life’s most pleasant and rare experiences is to have your already fairly lofty expectations of an event completely blown away by reality. We knew our Urban Eating League was going to be a lot of fun – locally sourced food, being invited into our friends’ homes, costumes, friendly competition, AND a talent-show?!? However, no amount of words or pictures can truly do the evening 40 or so people enjoyed this past Sunday justice. Perhaps it’s best to simply report that by the time everyone got to their second host-site and were guessing the secret ingredient, we all knew that we had stumbled upon an event that would not only bring all of us a lot of joy on this night and future nights, but that this format was going to get picked up by many communities around the world as a way to bring people together around local food. It was simply that good.

Can you feel the excitement of the Urban Eating League?

I’m not going to try to recount a play-by-play of who cooked what or which teams wore what or who got which awards (although everyone’s effort certainly warrants such a treatment) – it was the type of event that you simply had to be there to experience. But I think it’s worth taking a birds-eye view of some of the lessons the experience taught us.

Eaters listening intently as Alex explains the menu at Le Chateau du Breux

We’ve always said local food was the lynchpin issue of the sustainability movement and the Urban Eating League certainly confirmed that, although not in the “everybody eats three meals a day, so if you get them to choose the right food when they make that choice, then things really start happening” way that we usually mean it. Instead, the Urban Eating League was a great lesson in the subtle yet transformative power of » Read more: Urban Eating League – The Afterglow

Come out to the Sunshine Castle for a very special Wigg Party One-Year Anniversary Party featuring Bikes & Beats!

Over the past year, the Wigg Party has grown from an idea a few friends had into one of the nation’s leading urban sustainable community organizations. To celebrate our amazing year of moving the community that lives around the bike route the Wiggle toward sustainability and resilience, we’re teaming up with Bikes & Beats to throw our biggest Wigg Party Party yet!

Legendary

The evening kicks off at 8 pm with the Wigg Party meeting. This is where you come learn about everything that we’re up to – this month we’re going to feature our local currency we’re developing, our series of locally sourced progressive dinners we’re calling the Urban Eating League, and all of the exciting developments on tap for the Wiggle this year.

The evening also marks the inaugural event for Bikes & Beats. Bikes & Beats marries bicycle culture with the thriving underground music scene. While these events will typically feature a bicycle ride -> a guerilla dance party, they’ve decided to kick it all off with the Wigg Party at the Sunshine Castle. We all have Bikes & Beats to thank for this amazing musical lineup!

We’re also for the first time going to be using this Wigg Party Party as a fundraiser, so that we can grow and become even stronger in year two! $10 suggested donation, but nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. If you come for the meeting at 8 you get in free.

BYOB

LINE-UP
MC Zulu (Dancehall MC Inna Dubstep and Electro-Reggae Stylee, Panama via Chicago)
http://mczulu.com/

Future Simple Project LIVE w/ aka Mikey Fisher and Raja (Dubstep, Lazer Crunk – Family Moons, Boulder and SF)

http://futuresimpleproject.com/

Porkchop (Dubstep and Bass Music – SF)
Cyclyst (Slappers and Funksteppers – Bikes and Beats, SF)

Matt Haze (Bashment, Funky Tribal, Tropical, etc – Bikes and Beats, Slayers Club, SF)
http://soundcloud.com/matthaze

http://theslayersclub.com/

Brettronics ((Dubstep, Electro, Crunkstep – Akashic Records, SF)

DubVirus ((Dubstep, Electro, Crunkstep – Akashic Records, SF)

Wigglers, get ready for the inaugural edition of our newest local food program – the Urban Eating League!

Starting February 13th, we will host a monthly progressive dinner called the Urban Eating League. Each month, we will organize a dinner that will feature delicious, locally sourced meals hosted by multiple neighborhood homes. Enjoying these meals will be teams of eaters. The Eaters will both judge the different meals/host-sites and themselves be judged as guests, on anything from manners to costume creativity. It’s all in the service of eating local food and having fun!

No, not that kind of eating competition...

The inaugural event will unfold as follows. People interested in participating as eaters must organize a team consisting of three eaters and a team name and come find Morgan at the Divisadero Farmers’ Market Community Table on Sunday February 6th to register (he’ll have “the wig” on). Registration will be open to the first five teams plus the first three individuals (who together will comprise the “Randos” team) for a total of 18 eaters (we have three host-sites which can host two teams, or six eaters, at a time). The cost of registration is $10-$20 sliding scale for each eater, so for a team to successfully register they must present at least $30 along with the names of the eaters and a team name (all the money will go to pay for the food).

Those six teams lucky enough to register in time will meet at the Sunshine Castle (1571 Fulton) at 6 pm on the 13th to start the evening. Initial instructions and participating materials will be given out, and the teams will start off on their culinary odyssey at » Read more: Announcing the Urban Eating League

The Wigg Party is proud to bring you our very fist Inspiration Night!

This will be you tonight... metaphorically

We know that with all the scary things going on in the world, as we spend our days scratching and clawing for small victories, wondering what, if anything, it all means, we all could use a little inspiration in our lives. Enter Inspiration Night!

Come out to the Residence (718 14th St @ Church) tonight at 7 pm to be caught up in the rapture of the human spirit. There will be poetry, there will be song, there will be story. And permeating the whole event will be that warm fuzzy glow that comes from reveling in being alive and honoring all that has come before us.

$3 well drinks and $1 off beer from 7-9. $3 Trumer Pils (brewed right across the Bay in Berkeley) all night!

See you tonight!