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monthly news from ASAP | AUGUST 2023 | asapconnections.org
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Volunteer for the Farm Tour Sept. 23 or 24
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 Want to get an insider's view of a local farm—and have a great time and support ASAP? Consider volunteering for the Farm Tour!
We need volunteers on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 23-24, 11:30-5. You'll help welcome visitors at a farm—then, on the day you aren't volunteering, you get to tour for free! You can bring along however many friends or family you can pack into your car. It's a fun and rewarding way to connect with your community and get a behind-the-scenes look into the operations of working family farms in Western North Carolina. All participating farms are located within one hour of Asheville.
Find out more and sign up here.
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 El Tour de la Granja (23 y 24 de septiembre) ofrecerá visitas guiadas en español a tres granjas:
ASAP's Farm Tour (Sept. 23-24) will offer guided tours in Spanish at three farms. More information about the Farm Tour is available in Spanish.
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Meet Your Farmers: Southside Community Farm and The Liar's Table
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 Check out the two newest Meet Your Farmer videos from ASAP's Growing Minds team.
Meet Chloe Moore, the farm manager for Southside Community Farm, an urban food space in the historically black Southside neighborhood in Asheville. "Our focus is on community food. A farm like this is really important. It's a place that people can come and enjoy being outside, where they can access free healthy food, and come together as a community and connect over food," says Chloe.
Kaci Nidiffer of The Liars Table tells us how she and her husband, Amos, have grown their Avery County farm—and now shop—from a hobby to something they can share with their community. "The shop used to be an old greasy spoon diner," says Kaci. "They had a big long table where just anybody could sit down. And they had a big sign over it that said, 'The Liar’s Table' because a lot of the old-timers would sit there and tell stories and exaggeration was very common in these stories. So that was the origins of The Liar’s Table."
You can find more Meet Your Farmer videos, as well as related lesson plans and classroom resources on the Growing Minds website.
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Olivette Community's HarvestFest Is Aug. 27
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Join us for the the second annual HarvestFest, hosted by Olivette Community and Chatt Hills Music, benefitting ASAP's Double SNAP for Fruits and Vegetables, and celebrating local farmers. Doors open at 3 p.m. on Aug. 27 with family games and activities. The Barefoot Movement will kick off the bluegrass beats at 4 p.m. Farmers get pampered in a VIF (Very Important Farmer) section.
Tickets are $25, and kids, farmers, and farmer families get in for free. Tickets are available here. Ticket proceeds—as well as wine and beer sales, thanks to sponsor Wicked Weed Brewing and Vidl Cellars—will go toward Double SNAP for Fruits and Vegetables. |
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 Caleb Thomason is ASAP's new Farm Fresh for Health Program Coordinator. Caleb recently completed his Master's in Social Work from Western Carolina University, and has been working in mental health since 2019. He's excited to combine that professional training with an interest in food security work. Caleb will work with ASAP's Farm Fresh Produce Prescription, customer engagement at farmers markets, and other Farm Fresh for Health initiatives.
 Sigrid JensenOyaski is ASAP's new Local Food Campaign Program Coordinator. Sigrid recently graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Agricultural Communications. While there, she worked at Meat Science and Technology Center and also served as a summer intern at Stonewall Creek Vineyards in Tiger, Georgia. Joining ASAP's Local Food Campaign team, she'll work with farmer and partner programs, including farmer training programs and local food promotional campaigns. |
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 FACES OF LOCAL |
| |  For our Faces of Local interview this month, we talked to Greg Garrison, who owns The Hop with his wife, Ashley Garrison. They source local ingredients from several farms, particularly Lee’s One Fortune Farm, one of the farms featured on this year’s Farm Tour. Visit The Hop for local peach ice cream at one of their four locations—downtown Asheville, West Asheville, North Asheville, and Black Mountain!
What flavors are you making with Lee’s One Fortune Farm?
The relationship started with peaches. In 2019, [Chue and Tou Lee] reached out wanting to have ice cream to sell at markets. We said, “Well, we want peach ice cream too.” We now do three different flavors with their peaches, a straight-up peach, peach-blueberry with blueberries from another local farm, and Southern Comfort, which is a peach-bourbon ice cream. We’ve been making that for years, but now we make it with the Lees’ peaches. All three are available as vegan ice cream as well, made with pepita milk that we make in-house from scratch from pepita seeds.
This is our second year of using strawberries from the Lees. They actually created a new strawberry bed on a plot of land specifically for us. That was amazing because it extends our season for strawberry ice cream. I think 95 percent if not more of our strawberries this year were from Lees. Later in the fall, we’ll use their kabocha squash, which is a Japanese pumpkin, for our pumpkin ice cream.
Tou will often just bring fun stuff for us to play with. We’ve played around with nectarines and purple sweet potato, but we’re more dependent on what Tou has left. We’ve also used their rice for rice milk vegan ice cream. That’s not something we can do all the time. The restaurants and everyone else pretty much gobble that up before it’s even finished growing. If Tou sets some aside, we can make rice milk. Because it’s such a high-quality rice, it’s pretty creamy. It’s really easy to work with. Nuts and seeds take a little extra love. The times we had access to the rice we made mango-matcha-mochi, with fresh mango, and Ashley made matcha mochi.
Tell me about your relationship with the Lees.
One of the reasons why they have built such a reputation around their business is because of how genuine they are as humans. They just care so much about everybody they are talking to and interacting with. They’re always bringing gifts to anyone and everyone on our staff, and going an extra mile to get us produce on a certain day. They’re just slammed all the time. They’re doing all these markets. But they still find time to stop and chat and drop off produce and pick up ice cream. Never once have I heard them complain.
Ashley and I got to go out to the farm—the location that will be on the Farm Tour—with Eva Peterson, who is our business partner with POP Bubble Tea. We got to explore and pick berries, eat peas right of the vine, see the rice fields. Getting to see Tou on the farm—his enthusiasm is just out on his face all the time. He’s so excited about all of it, thinking about what at the farm could be turned into ice cream. Then he and Eva to to talk about cultivars coming from Asia and certain types of berries or produce. Eva was blown away by their ability to grow what they grow. Their produce is unique. It has its own story and they have their own story, which is inspiring and heart-wrenching. The combination of them being such wonderful people, coming from where they come from in their world, and way they approach their community, makes it so easy to support them.
What other local ingredients can we find in The Hop’s ice cream?
We’ve developed relationships with Bountiful Cities and Peace Gardens with Hood Huggers. We’ve been to KT’s Orchard for black raspberries, and we use Holt Orchard for apples. We’re coming into apple season, and we’ll be doing an apple and honey ice cream for Rosh Hashana. Rayburn Farm was the first farm where we developed a really strong relationship directly with the family. Michael has such a sweet tooth! He’s phasing himself into some new directions, but we still play with some things, like hot cocoa ice cream. He always has cool ideas. He has that basil collection that’s fun for one-off flavors.
Why are these community connections and local ingredients important to The Hop?
There’s an overarching philosophy that pretty much drives me and Ashley personally and is amplified by the business, and it’s that we’re part of a community. That’s where these collaborations and relationships come from. Once those relationships start, they go in so many different directions. It’s really cool to see that impact. Maybe it’s that our buying something from the Lees or from another farm makes the difference for them to expand their plot. They do that, and then they’re offering strawberries to other places, and everybody gets a better quality product, and they’re supporting the Lees instead of a farm outside the region. My take on it is that Asheville is the right size for building relationships.
Visit Lee's One Fortune Farm during the Farm Tour for an exclusive ice cream flavor from The Hop!
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 RECIPE OF THE MONTH |
| |  August is Tomato Time for farms and markets across the region. To celebrate we're sharing a recipe that makes a healthy and satisfying vegetarian meal out of them.
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 onion, thinly sliced
- 2 red bell peppers, seeded and thinly sliced
- 3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon sweet paprika
- Dash cayenne (optional)
- 3 cups fresh tomatoes, coarsely chopped with juices
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 4–6 large eggs
- 2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled (optional)
- 2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped
- Lemon juice to taste
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- In a large skillet, heat olive oil over medium-low. Slowly cook onions and peppers together for approximately 20 minutes or until they are very soft and begin to “melt.” Add garlic and cook until tender. Add spices and stir. Add tomatoes and continue to cook until most of their moisture has evaporated, about 10 to 15 minutes. Adjust seasoning if needed.
- Make four wells in the tomato mixture. Crack open an egg into each well. Place the skillet in the oven and bake about 8 minutes, until the eggs are just set.
- Remove from the oven. Sprinkle feta cheese, cilantro, and lemon juice on top of the baked eggs. Serve with hot sauce and toasted pita or crusty bread.
Find more summer recipes on our website!
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 MEDIA HIGHLIGHTS |
| “Starting with a general plan can help keep shopping affordable—and also healthy! Shopping at farmers markets and farm stands really encourages cooking for yourself or your family—which is almost always going to be more nutritious than eating out and relying on convenience or prepared foods.”
—Sarah Hart, ASAP's Communications Manager, in an Edible Asheville feature on healthy and affordable grocery methods, including ASAP's Double SNAP for Fruits and Vegetables and Farm Fresh Prescription Program
"Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project approaches a single problem from multiple angles: they want more local farmers to succeed in getting their high-quality produce into the hands of local eaters while also making enough money to live."
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ASAP's mission is to help local farms thrive, link farmers to markets and supporters, and build healthy communities through connections to local food.
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