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Hey there, come on in!
This is the website for the Habersham Hacienda, my farm, inn and wild foraging culinary adventure started in 2005 after selling my Atlanta restaurants. Downtown Decatur gems Supper Club and Billy Goat's Cantina were my two spots 1997-2007 I started the Hacienda in late 2005 and sold Spring 2019. Bittersweet but we thank Habersham County for 14 groovy years. I sold everything and drove to Mexico. In 2020 I came back to the US and then...well, we know what happened. A nine month stop in Tulsa was a great location to look into the Southwest and Midwest areas. Taking in some salt air and warm winter temps in Arizona and Florida for holiday 2020 and now ready to head back to the mountains and re-establish roots. I am available for farm to table culinary consultation, design work both residential and commercial and would enjoy getting back to an actual small town shopkeeper's life. The right fit of farm to table folks and good cheer. I don't need to own it, I'm happy being a back up singer and being part of a great team. North Georgia? North Carolina? Tennessee? We shall see. :-) ++++++++++++++++++++ On the experience page above, I keep a virtual resume for dates and context. Chef, organic farmer, permaculture enthusiast, trainer and teacher, herbalist, restaurateur, dog lover, hospitality pro, ingredient sourceress, writer and more. My love is food and getting people excited about it. The wellness aspect of buying and eating local and all the many ways that benefits communities and cultures is my life long passion. Telling the story of it is another love. I started my journey as a young culinary writer and travel critic for Travel & Leisure back in the mid 90s. The 90s! That rolled into opening my first restaurant outside of Atlanta (The Supper Club 1997) and then another! I sold and moved to a property in North Georgia Mountains in 2007 and started my own farm and culinary wild adventure. Heritage chickens, ducks and all. Another decade well spent. My next chapter I'm currently writing! Always happy to find my tribe and connect with others doing the good work of tending the land, the animals and sharing the love. The original Hacienda blog is here and there's some good stuff in there back to the farming days, Big Chicken, gentlewoman farming and how (not) to go broke, mid life reinvention (are we there yet?) and more. The first two books in my Decade of Dish series are available on Apple and Blurb below. 
If there's a tienda and ceviche, I shall find it!
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Goodbye to the Grand Dame,
2005-2019 the longest relationship I've ever had was with a house.
Brady has earned some serious hotel chops. Here in Saltillo, MX
villa del mar playa, state of Jalisco I think? I couldn't tell you how to get there. I was deep lost and then finally, this. Pacific Coast Mexico
getting brown like bacon in groovy prickly Tucson Nov 2020
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Oklahoma. Who'd a thunk?
Brady taking the beach view in pretending to be a Mexican roof dog in the coastal Santa Cruz in Nayarit
annual selfie. Nov 2020
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Cooking class with my work buddy sidekick Juanito aka Mowgli the Man Cub featured in my 2009 Essay 'How to Save 89cents' winner of the non fiction prize in New Southerner magazine.
HOW DID I GET HERE? (TLDR, but if you're curious...)
In 2007 I sold a couple of restaurants in Decatur, GA and got a wild hair (hare?) idea to move out to the country and start my own farm. It'll be fun, they said. It'll be rejuvenating, I thought.
Actually no one said that. Most of my friends and coworkers said, "What?! Why??" but away I went. I was pulled to the country lifestyle and peaceful days. Swapping the Atlanta traffic for pastoral mountain views of Northeast Georgia. Harvesting my own organic vegetables and trimming the tops off my ever replenishing sprouting cilantro. My mind conjured up all kinds of narrative about my flock of hens and their bounty of eggs with tangerine colored yolks. Fresh air. The soft pastures underfoot. I'd start a farmer's market in that front field near the entrance. Enjoy the small town chat at the feed store and slowly renovate a big old house and slowly add guest suites, a big central kitchen where I'd harvest my wild herbs and make tinctures and old timey remedies. The stress of being chef owner of 2 busy restaurants had taken its toll on my lifestyle (hello 30s, goodbye 30s) and my health. I needed radical change.
I got it. It just wasn't how I had played it out in my head.
It was not always an easy transition, this bucolic life. But over a decade of many trials (and many errors), I finally got the Habersham Hacienda up and running to the sustainable, magical vision I had always dreamed of. The guest suites, the loft apartment, the cooking classes, the rain gardens, the Apothecary, the wild meadows, the pollinator organic gardens, the wild harvested herbs, the chickens, the rotational grazing pastures, the compost, the soil and eco systems finally balanced. The songbirds, bats, beetles. Snakes, hawks and bees. I had the right crew to help me build, create and carry out my visions. A neighborhood family of endless brothers and cousins from Guatemala headed by Antonio, my work buddy for over 7 years. Juanito, Victor, Pedro, Calixto, Esteban. And one Mexican, my genius friend and muse, Fernando. Everything was coming together.
And then, I ran out of money.
In 2007 I sold a couple of restaurants in Decatur, GA and got a wild hair (hare?) idea to move out to the country and start my own farm. It'll be fun, they said. It'll be rejuvenating, I thought.
Actually no one said that. Most of my friends and coworkers said, "What?! Why??" but away I went. I was pulled to the country lifestyle and peaceful days. Swapping the Atlanta traffic for pastoral mountain views of Northeast Georgia. Harvesting my own organic vegetables and trimming the tops off my ever replenishing sprouting cilantro. My mind conjured up all kinds of narrative about my flock of hens and their bounty of eggs with tangerine colored yolks. Fresh air. The soft pastures underfoot. I'd start a farmer's market in that front field near the entrance. Enjoy the small town chat at the feed store and slowly renovate a big old house and slowly add guest suites, a big central kitchen where I'd harvest my wild herbs and make tinctures and old timey remedies. The stress of being chef owner of 2 busy restaurants had taken its toll on my lifestyle (hello 30s, goodbye 30s) and my health. I needed radical change.
I got it. It just wasn't how I had played it out in my head.
It was not always an easy transition, this bucolic life. But over a decade of many trials (and many errors), I finally got the Habersham Hacienda up and running to the sustainable, magical vision I had always dreamed of. The guest suites, the loft apartment, the cooking classes, the rain gardens, the Apothecary, the wild meadows, the pollinator organic gardens, the wild harvested herbs, the chickens, the rotational grazing pastures, the compost, the soil and eco systems finally balanced. The songbirds, bats, beetles. Snakes, hawks and bees. I had the right crew to help me build, create and carry out my visions. A neighborhood family of endless brothers and cousins from Guatemala headed by Antonio, my work buddy for over 7 years. Juanito, Victor, Pedro, Calixto, Esteban. And one Mexican, my genius friend and muse, Fernando. Everything was coming together.
And then, I ran out of money.
my wild front yard. I cut paths into the native growth over the years to add depth to the postage stamp of the previous flat lawns.
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the carpet of December. Each year the Japanese Maples dropped the firecracker leaves. Magnificent trees on this property, a specimen tree nursery in the 1950s
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