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The Appalachian Martini was just the start. Check out Kat's other pawpaw cocktail recipes:
The Mabon: The pawpaw’s creamy goodness is married with the heat of ginger and spiced rum.
Pawpaw Whiskey Sour: This classic drink gets a fruity twist.
Petticoat: It's like chocolate and pawpaws are having a love affair in your glass.
Cameron Terry’s family hadn’t farmed for two generations. Decades ago, his grandfather decided that life as a Georgia peanut farmer wasn’t for him, so he enlisted in the military and traveled the world for 20 years, eventually settling in Colorado. “He wanted to be as far from the farm as possible,” Terry says.
Yet, for all his grandfather’s attempts to distance himself from farming, Terry was obsessed with it. While living in the heart of Denver and working an uninspiring day job, Terry directed all his passion and energy into plants. Lettuce led to squash. Squash led to strawberries. Strawberries led to greens. “I was living a very rural lifestyle in the middle of the city,” he says.
Before long, Terry was out of room and out of patience. He knew he wanted to be a farm entrepreneur, but with the cost of land, he just couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Then, during a 2017 farming sabbatical in Canada, he stumbled upon Curtis Stone. This small-farm guru says he generates $100,000 a year on five yard-sized plots, totaling just one quarter of an acre. Aside from his own small yard, which serves as the business’s home base, Stone doesn’t own any of the land he farms. “We lease it out from homeowners in exchange for vegetables,” he explains on his YouTube channel, which has nearly 450,000 subscribers, “And we take all the labor of maintaining the lawn off them. A lawn is essentially a cost center. It doesn’t really produce anything for you.”
This unprecedented level of freshness caught the eyes of consumers at local farmers’ markets, where Terry first began selling—and, before long, restaurateurs like Nathan Sloan, the owner and executive chef at Bloom in Roanoke’s up-and-coming Wasena neighborhood. Says Sloan, “I was taught as a young chef in French restaurants, it’s all about the quality of the produce."
Terry provides Sloan with an exclusive lettuce mix that he uses at Bloom every week, mostly in salads, plus seasonal produce like okra, okra flowers, pea shoots, sunflower shoots, and wasabi shoots. Sloan weaves these fresh vegetables into his constantly evolving menu. Although Terry is a new grower, Sloan says he’s already on par with people who have been farming for decades.
Today, Terry’s business, Garden Variety Harvests, farms a hard-working quarter-acre spread across three plots, growing everything from strawberries to Napa cabbage. It’s the same amount of land as his inspiration, the Canada-based Stone, and, like Stone, Terry has made smart choices, focusing on high-value products and strategically intercropping them. His small acreage produces enough food to supply a half-dozen restaurants while he continues to sell at farmers’ markets.
Even so, Terry can see a point where he’ll need more space. “It becomes difficult to maintain more than a quarter-acre of land by myself, with all the driving and having to be in so many places at once,” he says. To find room to grow, Terry is now working with a cooperative farm trust, Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons. Following a model used in nine other communities across the country, they hope to secure larger plots, over 10 acres, through purchase or donation. The trust will then subdivide those plots and lease them to small farms like Garden Variety Harvests.
“We believe agricultural land should be used to feed the immediate community,” says Terry, who sees this extending naturally from ideals that drove him to farm yards in the first place. “The best way to do that is make sure the community owns the land.” But he knows that any transition is still a year or two away. For now, Garden Variety Harvest continues tilling underused yards and open spaces within Roanoke’s city limits, growing food for the same community where he lives.
This articles was originally published in Virginia Living Magazine.
Let's be honest — did anyone actually enjoy communion as a kid?
At my church, I'm pretty sure the “wine” was unsweetened prune juice and the “unleavened bread” tasted like saltless oyster crackers that had been left unsealed for six months. Compare them to the sugary bowl of Cap'N Crunch I ate before each service, and it's no surprise I grew up to be such a heathen.
Maybe things would have been different if I attended Emmanuel Baptist Church in Kanawha County, West Virginia. There, Chef Mike Costello’s grandmother helped keep the communion game strong.
"In the kitchen of the basement of the church," he said, "she and a lot of other women would be cooking together, and one of the things they'd be making, especially later in the week, were these communion wafers."
Though Mike never actually took them as communion, he and his brother would snack on the crackers while the church ladies cooked. "They were so light and crispy and salty. And they were just so delicious."
Looking back, he realizes this was the first time he watched a community come together to prepare food. As a farmer and chef, that's now part of his daily life. At Lost Creek Farm, Mike and his wife Amy Dawson host community dinners, and each meal starts with his childhood wafers.
"These little crackers," he said, "are some of the most significant things I could put on the plate."
See more from Mike and Amy below, and tell us about your experience with communion wafers. Have they been handmade delights like Mike's or prepackaged blandness like mine?
Communion Wafers
from Emmanuel Baptist Church
via Lost Creek Farm
Makes a half sheet pan of crackers
Prep time: 5-10 minutes
Total time: 20-30 minutes
Ingredients:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees In a large bowl, combine the flour and ½ teaspoon of the salt, then stir to combine.
Add water and oil. Mix until ingredients are evenly combined and there are no pockets of flour remaining. The dough should come together as a soft mass. It should feel slightly oily, but not at all sticky.
On a floured surface, roll dough evenly, maintaining the general shape of your baking pan. Flour dough, rotate and turn over frequently during the rolling process. Roll until thin, about ⅛ inch or thinner.
Sprinkle the remaining salt evenly over the dough. If desired, add other flavoring (herbs, spices, seeds, cheese, etc.). Make a light pass over dough with a rolling pin to press additives into the dough. Carefully transfer dough to a baking sheet.
Use a sharp knife or a rotary cutter to trim excess dough from edges of pan. Cut crackers into desired shape. If making crackers larger than 1 or 2 inch squares, poke several holes into the dough with a fork.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool before serving.
Who doesn't love an apple stack cake?
With layers of cake and spiced apples, this hearty desert is sort of Appalachia's answer to the English trifle. And like the trifle, it can have variations. <
A delicious mini version, the fruit stack pie uses fewer layers and invites you to pick whatever filling you like best. Apple, peaches, pears, plums — they're all game in this second scrumptious recipe in Foxfire's baking series. Inspired by the hit TV show The Great British Bake Off, this Appalachian culture and history center is drawing from over fifty years worth of recipes to spotlight four delicious bakes.
Have you ever had an apple stack cake? What do you think about this adaptation?
Be sure to leave a comment below, and check out the first recipe in this series — Scotch Cake.
Adapted from The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery
Ingredients:*The original recipe calls for 1 full cup sugar + 1/2 cup molasses. We found this was too sweet and reduced it.
**We recommend making your own filling; any pie filling will do, so long as the juices are cooked to a thick syrup. Check out our post on half-moon pies for instructions on making apple pie filling.
Sift together dry ingredients in separate bowl. Cream together shortening and sugar until fluffy. Add egg and beat well. Mix in molasses/sorghum. Slowly mix the flour mixture into egg moisture. Divide dough into 3 or 4 balls. Lay out 3-4 squares of parchment paper. Trace a 9″ circular cake pan on each parchment sheet then flip over. Roll out dough (one on each parchment sheet) to 1/4-inch thick and bake each circle about 5-8 minutes in a 350 degrees Fahrenheit oven. (Watch these closely!) Let pastry cool completely, and then spread fruit between each layer of pastry and stack. Refrigerate overnight before serving.
For more stacking layers, double the recipe! If you find your layers are too dry, add a little buttermilk to get the consistency you want. But remember, after it sits overnight, the layers will soften from the fruit juices.
True confession — I am obsessed with The Great British Bake Off. Watching it, I discover amazing food like pavlova, a meringue dish named after a Russian ballerina. I find inspiration in the contestants, who exude camaraderie even as they compete, sometimes even helping one another in a pinch. And I laugh out loud at the show's comedian hosts. Seriously, I'd buy a Noel Fielding action figure if I could find one.
Turns out, I'm not the only one who loves the show. The folks at Foxfire, Appalachia's premier center for history and culture, are honoring Bake Off with a delicious series of mountain bakes. Having collected heritage recipes in the region for more than fifty years, they have no shortage of options.
After a lot of pondering, baking, and eating, they decided to start with scotch cake. This showpiece of a recipe was originally published in 1984 as part of their now classic collection The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery. It's a spicy, warm cake that ends up surrounded by thick, fluffy frosting. As if that's not enough, it's then studded with pecans and coconut, making it both delicious and beautiful.
Have you ever tried or made a scotch cake? Would you? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Originally published and shared by Foxfire
Ingredients:
Cream together butter and cocoa. Add milk and vanilla. Stir in confectioners sugar and mix thoroughly. Last add pecans and coconut.
As Quaker Oats acknowledges that Aunt Jemima syrup is "based on a racial stereotype" and rebrands the product, guest writer Dave Tabler looks back at the Appalachian woman who originally portrayed this controversial character.
Nancy Green (1834-1923), a former slave from Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, moved to Chicago after the Civil War, where she went on to become one of the first African American models employed by an American company to promote a product.
“Nancy Green was a middle-aged woman living on the South Side of Chicago, working as a cook and housekeeper for a prominent judge. After a series of auditions, she was hired to cook and serve the new pancake recipe at the World’s Fair. Part of her act was to tell stories from her own early slave life along with plantation tales about Aunt Jemima’s New Orleans childhood written for her by a white southern sales representative.
“The Aunt Jemima trademark was constructed as part of the budding concept of an American Dream for the American family. One year after the Fair, the R.T. Davis Milling Company introduced the Aunt Jemima paper doll family: five dolls that could be cut out from the pancake box. Aunt Jemima’s paper doll family was one of the most popular company premiums; collectors still prize a complete set over the individual dolls.
“This popular re-creation of an African American woman’s life stood in direct opposition to the efforts of real African American women struggling to publicly assert their citizenship. As a symbol of racial harmony, Aunt Jemima proved to be the preferred version of African American womanhood — an exaltation of ‘slaveocracy’ nostalgia.”
This story was previously published on Dave Tabler's blog Appalachian History.
I don't know that it's possible in Appalachia, but if your granny didn't teach you how to make chow chow, we have a treat for you. The below recipe was crafted by a team of chefs, farmers, and food fanatics who adore our region's signature relish so much, they named their new food festival after it.
Chow Chow, the event, will bring some of the nation's biggest food stars to Asheville, September 12 to 15, 2019, and promises to cement the Paris of the South's reputation as a culinary mecca.
It's helmed by restauranteur Katie Button, the chef and entrepreneur who sets up (and sometimes breaks down) food ventures faster than most of us make coffee. In 2011, she opened the Spanish influenced Curate, which was lauded as one of the 40 most important restaurants in the last 40 years by Food & Wine magazine. On the heels of writing a cookbook with the same name, she opened Nightbell, an upscale bar that pulled heavily from Appalachian food traditions. While it was hit, Katie made a tough choice and closed Nightbell, shifting her attention to Button & Co. Bagels, which opened last year and, now, Chow Chow, the festival that will spotlight Appalachia's creative spirit while bringing together all kinds of makers—from celebrity chefs to multi-generational farmers to millers, bakers, potters, weavers, and brewers.
And still, Katie still found time to chat with us!
The below interview has been edited a bit for brevity's sake. Also, be sure to post a comment—how do you like to eat your chow chow? And do you have a favorite recipe?
KB: Asheville is a city of makers, from beekeepers to farmers, to brewers, distillers, chefs, potters, glassblowers, it is pretty amazing everything that this city has to offer. We wanted a festival that celebrated all of the makers that come together around what we are calling the "creative table." As for the name, we loved the name Chow Chow because it incorporated a little bit of education about the region we are in, Southern Appalachia, and a pickle relish that is at the core of the food culture and history here.
TR: What are the must-do sessions for fans of Appalachian cooking?
KB: Pickled in the Park is our main event throughout the weekend, and it should not be missed. There will be a makers market, tons of local and nationals chefs and beverage professionals, live music, demonstrations, educational experiences, and you will get to see some of our makers in action in our technique area. It will be the best way to learn the most about our corner of Appalachia. Each day will have different chefs and makers. On Friday in the park, Vivian Howard will be doing a conversation about pickles throughout the world and across North Carolina, and Ashley English and Barbara Swell will be doing a demo of cooking chow chow.
TR: I noticed that you all use the words “Appalachia” and “Blue Ridge” a lot, but I also see that chefs are coming from all over the country. Is this an Appalachian food event or a food event set in Appalachia?
KB: It is a food event set in Appalachia. Therefore there will be lots of influence by the ingredients, culture, and traditions of the region popping up throughout the festival, however this festival is not exclusively about Appalachia. We are inviting chefs and friends of ours to come cook beside us, learn more about Asheville, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Southern Appalachia, and take what they learn back to their own communities.
TR: For folks who are visiting our mountains for the first time—celebrity and otherwise—what do you hope they take away from the experience?
KB: I hope they learn something. We have really wanted to make all of our programming to have an educational element as well as a collaborative element inviting different types of makers to collaborate and work together at each event.
TR: You invited people to host “non-official” activities around the event? What’s the most exciting ones you’ve seen?
KB: I'm super excited that Cherry Bombe [a magazine described by one of its founders as "food, femininity, and a kind of fierceness'] will be here hosting a panel discussion. I love what they do and the voice that they have in the restaurant industry, supporting women.
Mountain Dew — now the country's third most popular soft drink — began because two Knoxville brothers needed a tasty mixer for their bourbon.
That 1940s-styled Mountain Dew didn't taste like today's lemonade-citrus, caffeine- and sugar-charged drink. As clear as the moonshine whose moniker it borrowed, this Dew tasted like today's 7Up or Sprite.
Years later, when Mountain Dew began tasting like today's Mountain Dew, it was first called lemonade and sold in a clear bottle.
Turning a Knoxville whiskey mixer into a soft drink to "tickle yore innards" took mixology magic, business savvy and a marketing campaign filled with gun-toting, jug-swigging barefoot Appalachian hillbillies.
I’m sure that for the unsuspecting outsider the sight of my 110-lb granny climbing a West Virginia hillside with a burlap sack tied around her shoulder would have proven to be quite a spectacle – especially when she’d hunch over and begin filling her bag with what would appear to the untrained eye as nothing more than a bunch of weeds.
If asked what she was planning to do with all those “weeds”, I have no doubt that this 5ft.-nothing tower of a woman would have replied with something akin to, “these here ain’t no weeds – this is my poke salad.”
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