monthly news from ASAP    |   June 2025    |    asapconnections.org

2025 Local Food Guide Is Out Now!
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The new Local Food Guide, ASAP's annual free publication for finding local food and farms, is out now! Look for print copies at farmers markets, visitors centers, libraries, grocery stores, and other local businesses—or you can check out a digital version of the print Guide here : [link removed].


: [link removed]The Local Food Guide offers hundreds of listings for farms, farmers markets, restaurants, groceries, artisan producers, and travel destinations. The 2025–26 edition also looks at the impact of Hurricane Helene on farms, with recovery stories from Sustainabillies/Two Trees Farm (pictured above), Green Toe Ground Farm, Tiny Bridge Farm, and Two Stones Farm + Mill. The Guide also features the evolution of Southside Community Farm (pictured right) and the growth of SNAP programs at farmers markets in Western North Carolina. Rounding out the issue are recipes from chefs at Buncombe County Schools, Chai Pani, Feed and Seed Co., Red Fiddle Vittles, and Taqueria Rosita. 
 



In addition to the print Guide, ASAP maintains the online Local Food Guide at appalachiangrown.org : [link removed]. This database, with more than 1,400 listings, is updated throughout the year and is searchable by products, location, activities, and more.



Celebrating the End of the School Year for Growing Minds
: [link removed] we wrap up the 2024-25 school year, we were thrilled to hear that Haywood County Schools received the USDA Healthy Meals Incentive Award for Innovation in Nutrition Education. This year our Growing Minds team worked with Pisgah High School's Career and Technical Education to deepen the farm-to-school focus within their horticulture, food science, and animal science curricula. CTE students became ambassadors to their elementary school classmates, leading taste tests and Kindergarten Day events. Additionally, ASAP staff worked with Two Trees Farm/Sustainabillies to offer a direct marketing and business planning workshop for students. 
 

On the Early Care and Education side, we concluded the first round of our ECE Academy, a project that allowed centers to not only receive farm to ECE support and encouragement from Growing Minds staff, but also from their peers. Centers each received supplies and stipends to support farm-to-ECE activities, in-person staff training, and monthly check-ins. The centers included in the first ECE Academy were High Country Head Start (Avery County), Growing Wild Forest School (Buncombe County), Verner Center for Early Learning (Buncombe County), Burke Early Head Start (Burke County), The Play and Learning Center (Henderson County), WNC Source King Creek Children's Center (Henderson County), WNC Source Clear Creek Pre-K (Henderson County), Pisgah Collective (Transylvania County), and Western TLC Head Start (Watauga County).



Catch Farms on News 13 WLOS This Summer
Catch farmers and producers from across Western North Carolina live on WLOS News 13 : [link removed] for Homegrown Fridays! This summer, News 13 is celebrating farmers and locally grown products by sending meteorologist Jason Boyer to farms across our region. Every Friday through August, from 5 to 7 p.m., Jason will broadcast live and deliver weather updates along with short interviews with farmers, highlighting the people, the farms, and the unique products that make Western North Carolina special.

If you watched the weather report from this past Friday, you may have caught Anna Zurliene, market manager of East Asheville Tailgate Market : [link removed], along with ASAP's Oakley Brewer and Sarah Hart, chatting about what's fresh right now, where to shop at farmers markets all week long, and how else you can connect with farms in the region.



Meet Gianna Rath, ASAP's Farm Fresh for Health Intern
Gianna Rath is ASAP’s summer Farm Fresh for Health intern. Look for her at farmers markets this summer popping up with seasonal taste tests, kids activities, and more! (Tip: She'll be at Enka-Candler Farmer's Market : [link removed] tomorrow from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.) She's also leading local food activities for kids and youth at Asheville Parks & Recreation summer camps.
 

Gianna is currently a student at University of Wisconsin–La Crosse with a passion for the health outcomes of youth through implementation of public and community health education. She was drawn to ASAP for her internship thanks to aligned passion for nutrition education and focus on the policy impacts of local food accessibility. In her free time, she's enjoying trying local restaurants and going for hikes in and around the Blue Ridge Mountains.



FACES OF LOCAL
William Dissen
: [link removed] Dissen is the chef and owner of The Market Place : [link removed] in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, serving hyper-local and regionally sourced meals with a high attention to quality, flavor, story, and heart. Beginning his chef career at the age of 15, he took over The Market Place from Mark Rosenstein in 2009, and has helped grow Asheville’s local food and farm connections. The Market Place is one of the restaurants selected for Appalachian Farms Feeding Families, one of ASAP’s post-Helene programs aimed at supporting restaurants and strengthening market outlets for farms. 
 

How does this program help to uphold the mutually beneficial relationship between restaurants and farms?  

I feel ASAP is one of the most undervalued nonprofits here in the region. Our food scene certainly wouldn’t be as robust as it is without all the great work ASAP has done over the years.
 

We decided to partner with Sunburst Trout Farms : [link removed] for the mini grant. I’ve known the Eason family since I moved here and they are such kind-hearted good people—they put so much care into the fish that they are growing. Having a third generation rainbow trout farm just 20 miles from Asheville is really special. If you’re going down 215 from the Blue Ridge Parkway, it’s like the first civilization that the granite-filtered mountain water hits. So, it’s ice cold, super clean, and with high minerality—that’s part of why the fish are so good. It’s both the care that is going into raising the fish and the location. Being able to have Sunburst Trout in our backyard, the fish is swimming in the morning and on the table by night—talk about fresh! People come into our restaurant thinking that they don’t like trout, and they are blown away. 
 

I got to this area before Asheville really took off, and I feel like we’ve been a part of it’s growth, especially its food community. Some friends told me to visit Asheville and when I came up for the Lake Eden Arts Festival. I stopped by Earth Fare and there was a stack of ASAP’s Local Food Guide : [link removed]. I picked up one and thought, “Wow, this is all the stuff I grew up doing in Virginia with my grandparents on their farm.” It was clear to me that Asheville had an amazing local food scene and this guide is a resource to find all the great ingredients I would need. It was so much easier than earlier in my career when I was spending so much time tracking down all these different local ingredients I wanted to cook with. That’s when I thought I should start looking at Asheville to start my own restaurant. 
 

What role do restaurants play as a part of Helene Recovery in our region?
 

Restaurants are the lifeblood of our local economy. We are a tourism- and service-based economy in Western North Carolina. One-third of the population here works directly in tourism or a service-based job. Coming out of Helene, obviously tourism has been down because of the devastation, but we are reopen and ready to invite people back. It’s good for people to realize what the greater effect of restaurants are on our community. They’re a great place to come together to celebrate, to mourn, to have a meeting, or to just have a great meal—restaurants are like a great escape where you can choose your own adventure. 
 

Restaurants like ours have a powerful impact on the local economy. We have quantified that over the years and we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on local ingredients. We quantify that there’s almost a five-time return to the local economy. As a small business, that’s the kind of powerful impact we can make. Imagine if everyone sourced that way, how robust of a local food and farm economy we would have.
 
 

What is your favorite thing to cook? 
 

It depends. I have two wonderful children and I cook a lot at home. We love to eat fresh vegetables and with having kids I try to sneak them in whenever I can. I do a lot of stir frys, but my favorite thing to cook right now is chicken cacciatore. I’ll go to the market and get a whole chicken, break it into eight pieces, and brown it off. I’ll grab some local mushrooms from Black Trumpet Farm : [link removed] along with onions and garlic scapes and sauté those and the first tomatoes of the season. Add white wine and cook that down until it’s super aromatic, then braise the chicken in it. I like to serve that with some butter noodles or jasmine rice. I’ll sprinkle some Spinning Spider : [link removed] goat cheese on the top. It’s a fresh but also hearty dish. It’s great when you’ve been running around outside and you have two kids ready to eat you out of house and home.

RECIPE OF THE MONTH

Summer Squash Frittata : [link removed] squash is coming in hot at farmers markets, farm stands, and home gardens! Make them a meal with this delicious frittata.
 
Ingredients
1 ½ cups chopped summer squash6 large eggs1 cup mozzarella, shredded, or feta, crumbled½ cup milk1 small onion, diced (optional)1 tablespoon olive oilSalt and pepper to tasteDirections
Wash, trim, and cut fresh summer squash into cubes.
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. In a pan, heat the cooking oil over medium heat. Add in the diced onion and cook until translucent, about five minutes.
In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper until well combined. Add the squash and cooked onions to the egg mixture. Stir in the shredded mozzarella cheese.
Pour the mixture into a greased oven-safe baking dish. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the center is set and the top is lightly golden.
Allow the frittata to cool slightly before slicing and serving.
Find more recipes at growing-minds.org : [link removed] and asapconnections.org. : [link removed]
 

"We’re always centered on where can this help increase farm sales and build into those existing systems to be able to support farms not just as a one-off, but as a piece of their farm business plan. So it’s not just about making sure that they’re making a living, which is how we’re keeping farmers farming, but also about making sure that all segments of our community can feel pride in contributing to their success."
—Molly Nicholie, ASAP Executive Director, in EdNC's report : [link removed] on North Carolina's first Food Is Medicine Symposium
 

“[Healthy Opportunities Pilot] is a model for how we spend health care dollars better—before people get sick—and in a way that actually improves outcomes and supports the whole community.” The nonprofit ASAP used HOP funds to expand its Farm Fresh Produce Prescription program. In 2024 alone, more than 675 households participated, and $215,000 went directly to local farms.
—Laurie Stradley, Executive Director of Impact Health, in a story by Blue Ridge Public Radio : [link removed] about the potential loss of the Healthy Opportunities Pilot
 

"Cuts to SNAP have the potential to impact not just families, but the wider economy in the mountains. By providing residents with dollars to spend on food, the SNAP program puts those dollars into the pockets of local retailers, and in turn, farmers."
—Carolina Public Press : [link removed] on increasing challenges for healthy food access in Western North Carolina
 

"We made our way to Asheville City Market, a Saturday morning farmers’ market that might just be the purest expression of the town’s spirit you’ll find."
—48 Hours in Asheville travel report : [link removed] for Style Blueprint

CONNECT WITH ASAP
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asapconnections.org : [link removed] | growing-minds.org : [link removed] | appalachiangrown.org : [link removed]
  
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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ASAP (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project) - 306 W. Haywood Street - Asheville - NC - 28801

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