Hello fellow members of Grow Appalachia,

This week we are featuring Emily Newton & Lynmarie Knight, roommates & first year Grow Appalachia participants, both of these young ladies love supporting local food and the community. We are proud to have them as participants and hope you enjoy Emily’s lovely blog below 🙂 If you would like to know more delicious local food recipes Emily has a regular blog here : http://139025842664005414.weebly.com/

   
It would be considered a mortal sin, if we were not all guilty of it. 
The offence I speak of is taking this place, our home for granted. We have all done it. We live here, we get comfortable,we forget how lucky we are to wake up to these mountains and this community every day.
…Then something shifts and we remember.
….We take a trip and find ourselves longing for the Greenbrier river, or there’s a particularly great sing along session that reminds us…or a friend comes to visit and we have a dinner that spreads the table fresh herbs, local greens and homemade goat cheeses. Then, then I tell you is when we cannot help but remember that we live in a special place, with special people. And really good food.
    Thursday night two friends came here to visit our Little Levels Valley. They drove in  from my home town of Louisville Kentucky, a fair city with a thriving restaurant culture, hip to the latest trends in food, coffee, beer and wine. So my guests were no strangers to good food, however they were thrilled by the greens and cheeses that did not come from the grocery store, or the farmers market, but the backyard! Before we settled into the house for the evening, they helped me milk the goats and the next morning they admired the honey bees as we cooked down the sugar water on the stove to feed the bees, before we finished our breakfast of left over corn muffins and farm eggs.
    The night before, the dinner conversation migrated from topics of flee beetles to community gardens at the nursing home and the women’s prison. As we migrated to the porch for drinks and star gazing, I tossed myself back and forth in the hammock and the conversation swung to the fascinating National Geographic articles we have encountered and pest management strategies.
    This is a special place and somehow we have managed together to cultivate a community that truly cares about the quality of food we eat and the food we raise. We are all blessed, and should be thankful. But we should also be proud, because we have chosen this life style. It is not for lack of trying and it is not by accident that we have ended up here. We have not all just fallen into this valley of food conscious, goat raising, garden keeping, green growing weirdos…we have chosen to be here; to milk goats, to feed our bees before we make our breakfast and to serve our friends good food.
   There is something about visitors that reminds us just how much we care, and how lucky we are. From these June days of early summer, lets vow to remember that we are truly lucky, and let the only sin we commit be the Bourbon soaked brownies we will eat for dessert.
A Menu for Visiting Friends:

 
*Lobilia Farm Greens and Cilantro,
*Homemade Goat Cheese

*Grilled Rosemary Peach Corn Muffins
*Saute’d Yellow Squash and Plums
*South Carolina Shrimp
From the Kitchen of:
Lynmarie and Emily