Come Sit At My Table

I'm Sarah Long, writer, farmer, and chef with an abiding passion for building community through growing and cooking sustainably grown, contemporary Appalachian food.  

Like many of you, I got my culinary start in my grandmother's kitchen where I learned to make and bake gooey chocolate chip cookies, fluffy, lemony pound cakes, and fall-off-the-bone-tender stringy roasts with those addictive burnt ends still in tact. I spent a good majority of my childhood and later adolescence under my grandmother's feet in her kitchen and sewing room, or outside helping her tend her prized dahlias, or harvesting scuppernongs from the vines that grew alongside her house. My grandmother, who I called Mimi, enjoyed messin' and a' gommin', "gomming", a Scottish word turned Southern phrase meaning to make a glorious mess. And some fine messes we made together, indeed.

Though I came of age in a decidedly Southern kitchen, I was exposed to other, more exotic cuisines too. My closest friend and next door neighbor was a Puerto Rican girl whose mother was a fabulous baker and home cook. Many an afternoon, I'd walk into her madre's tiny kitchen and take in the smell and sounds of tortillas sizzling in the fry pan or arroz y habichuelas stewing on the stove. Puerto Rican food was widely available in my rural town if you knew where to look for it, as was Mexican, Cuban and some indigenous foods, too, as Florida is home to the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Poarch Creek nations. Their influence on Florida food ways meant that alligator and swamp cabbage (better known as hearts of palm), were often found on restaurant menus. And, #truestory, I've actually been alligator hunting. It's wicked good fun (and delicious!). 

I have always been an adventurous eater. I first consumed raw oysters when I was 5 years old, had my own coffee cup at Mimi's house by 6, and my preference for and devotion to stinky blue cheese began before anyone can really remember, and has since become legendary in my family. When I went away to college, I joined the International Club. I don't remember what we did, exactly, as a club, but I do remember that some of my closest friendships sprouted from my participation in it. These friends hailed from countries I'd read about in National Geographic but only dreamed about visiting: India, Ireland, Egypt, Thailand, Albania. Epicurean by nature (or maybe bacchanalian is more like it), I threw proto-supper club dinners for these friends wherein, for some unknown reason, I thought it was a good idea to make a dish from their home country having never visited and in some cases never eaten the dish before myself! Adventurous indeed, if not also irrational. 

I tried my hand at Pad Thai, Dublin Coddle, and Kofta, all of which were utter failures, of course. When my friends RSVP'd for one of my parties, they knew they'd be eating pizza by the night's end. Still, they had a good laugh at my expense, and I learned how to host a good time. Sometimes, true hospitality looks like take out pizza and moving all the furniture outside to turn your apartment living room in a makeshift salsa club. 

Over time, and with lots of help, I learned about ratios, companion ingredients, the importance of patience, practice, tasting, timing and humility. The kitchen is an exacting judge. After graduating, I was lucky enough to earn a scholarship to study for a master's degree in England and lived in a small town in the North on the coast near the Scottish border. Here, I experienced the delight of fresh fish from a proper fish monger and Saturday farmer's markets, and also haggis, stuffed goose, warm beer, and of course, that amber-hued water-of-life known as Scottish whiskey.

I've spent years saving lots of pennies so I could spend my free time eating my way through east Africa and Zanzibar (oh gawwwwd, the lime-drenched grilled octopus!), France and Italy (tripe is not for me but give me allllll the butter), Sweden, Germany, Denmark (Stegt flæsk anyone?), Costa Rica and Spain. I even landed a job as an English teacher at a business school in Vietnam for a while, where I taught during the day and attended cooking classes at night at the famous "Old Hanoi" restaurant, which Gordon Ramsey helped revive. I've eaten fried ants and knocked back shots of Son Tihn flavored with cobra-heart blood, but despite my need to wander and indulge my insatiable culinary curiosity, I always find myself making my way back home. My roots -- both adoptive and biological, as it turns out -- are in the South. Cooking Southern and Appalachian food is stitched into my memory and runs, literally, through my blood. 

I moved to North Carolina in 2015 to work at Appalachian State University as a professor writing, where I still happily teach, research, and write about issues related to food justice, climate change, and farming. In 2017, I decided to turn theory into practice and launched Heartwood Farms, where I raised meat rabbits to supply local food hubs and restaurants. In two short years, Heartwood grew into the largest rabbitry in Western North Carolina, supplying some of the finest restaurants in the area humanely (controversial though this term is) slaughtered rabbits and organically produced vegetables. I became friends with some of the best chefs cooking between Blowing Rock, Abingdon, and Asheville, and was even in talks with the chef at Barbara Kingsolver's divine restaurant, Harvest Table, to vend my my rabbit when COVID19 hit. And that's when the bottom fell out.

The pandemic decimated the restaurant industry and forced many smallholders and producers like me out of business. I hung on for that first long and dreadful year, but by the fall of 2020, the decision was clear: it was my sanity (and I mean this literally) or the farm. So, I agreed to sell my farm and moved to another part of the county into a sweet little house atop a hill in the forest where I decamped for two years and tried to figure out who I was if I wasn't a farmer or cook anymore. 

Like many people, I floated through those long, lonely days of the pandemic rather listlessly. I missed my farm and farm community and longed for the pleasure of watching seedlings burst through soft hummus in spring, chickens dust bathe in the summer sun, and clients delight in the quality of the food I grew, and sometimes cooked, for them. I sank into a pretty deep depression. To keep myself from going under I started cooking and writing and growing again with abandon. 

I joined Facebook groups like @Cookvid19. I bought and devoured cookbooks cover to cover. I found the work of Ronnie Lundy, Edna Lewis and Sean Brock. Oh and -- spoiler alert -- I also discovered who my birth mother was! I took all this love for family, food and farming and the heartbreak of losing the things I loved the most, and wrote a book, which was, to my great surprise, shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport prize! I cooked and ate and wrote my way to something that resembled peace, if not yet happiness. Little did I know that real happiness was just around the corner. 

In the summer of 2021, this tall, skinny Yankee (affectionately, she says) farm boy asked me on a date and then left the next day for six weeks to work his family's hunting camp in Pennsylvania. We had virtual cocktails most every night of those six weeks (we're both bourbon lovers) and when he and his black lab began their trip home, they booked it straight to my little house in the big woods of Western North Carolina. We weren't apart much after that.  A year later, he proposed at a Victorian-era inn (because I'm a sucker for dusty old furniture) nestled on a river, after one of the best martini's of my life, the ring sitting atop a piece of carrot cake. Swoon. We were married that December at sunset in a small ceremony encircled by friends, family and 100-year-old Florida oak trees dripping in grey-green moss. It was perfect in every detail.

But I still had the itch to farm and make food and so, a year after we were married, we bought five acres of rolling Tennessee hill country near the North Carolina border with a gorgeous creek rippling through it, and gloamings so beautiful they will make your heart bleed, and began building our forever home board by board, just he and I. We bought a pretty, red tractor, cut in a large culinary garden, picked out the location of our one-day orchard, raised a barn, rescued some donkeys, moved my chickens (the only thing I kept from my former farm life), and built a greenhouse to extend the growing season. Then, we bought 7.5 more acres next door and now have 13 acres of farmland. 

The hubs' tireless devotion, relentless work ethic, steady gentleness, and support of my passions and covenant with the earth, made it possible for me to find my way back to the farm, back to food, and back to myself. Now, I want to share all that lip-smackin' goodness with you.

Spade & Spoon is the culmination of a long exploration into food and identity that, for me anyway, began in early childhood and continues today. It's a food blog, storefront, and digital cowbell for our new supper club, opening in spring/summer '25. You can buy some of my pottery for the kitchen and garden; read, try out, and comment on my recipes and become a part of our growing community of growers and cooks; or, you can become a member of the Midnight Runner's Supper Club  (the only underground restaurant in Johnson City) and join us for exclusive dinners and events at our farm.

No matter how you got here or why you've stayed to till the end, I'm awfully glad you came. 

Now, let's eat!