My favorite job I have ever had was serving coffee at the Fayetteville Farmers Market. I was in college at the time as a non-traditional student raising my firstborn son. Every Saturday, I would get up before sunrise to load in 50-gallon water jugs, coffee grinders, brewers, pastries, easy ups, and all the accouterment required to serve the massive line that this local coffee roaster had acquired through their 20-year tenure in the area. They were ahead of their time in serving direct-to-farm, lighter roast coffee, which was still rare in 2012. It was during this time in my life when so many things were culminating, young motherhood, a career path (I was on track to be a doctor), and my love for food and beverage (at this point, I had been in the service industry for more than a decade, massage school, bartending and of course cooking). The farmers market changed the trajectory of my life; I became sure that my next chapter had to include farmers, fresh foods, and introducing people to those two things. It was during those early mornings after the coffee bar was hefted into place and coffee was ground and air pots filled we would take turns walking the market, talking to the farmers, trading cups of coffee for little boxes of mulberries, or the very first and only batch of golden raspberries that would never hit the public market.
One of my favorite farms, Ugly Bunny Farm, was always an early stop; they had an array of plants, herbs, fruits, and one early morning they had two large bundles of culinary lavender. It was so fragrant and juicy, and I knew right away what to do with it. I came home that night and made my first lavender simple syrup with pure cane sugar, water, and tons of fresh lavender flowers, which I quickly steeped to flash out their essence. It was SO good. I brought it back to market the next week and shared it with the farmers and our coffee crew. We made lavender lattes, lemonades, and sparkling waters. It didn’t take long before I made my way through anything you could buy at the market; strawberry rhubarb, blueberry thyme, beet lemon shrub, carrot coriander shrub, the list went on and on. We made drinks and sold them to the community and the lines grew and grew. I was living in a 100-year-old pink house at the time, cooking these syrups on an old 40’s gas stove; the alchemy was finding different ways to extract the “gold” from each fresh ingredient. It made sense. It was almost as if it had always been. And that is how Pink House Alchemy was born.
Farmers market pop up circa 2012; notice the oil cloth (we would drive up to this “bits and bobs shop” in a tiny town east of here and stock up from their latest rolls). This set up came well before my time, and remains much the same more than 20 years later,
The original packaging for the Pineapple Rosemary Margarita. We sold kits in old fruit boxes or old cigar boxes for smaller kits. The vibe still holds strong all these years later.
circa 2013
My baby girl was born in the pink house. A darling shot of Maude.
The pink House, built in the early 1900s, is a magic little thing. It has had some of the most interesting residents; the current resident is an incredible and disruptive crochet artist, at one time a woman names Pansy Le Fluer lived here for decades. It is a home of creativity without doubt and it was here that pink House alchemy was began to take shape.
