Hi!

I’m Sarah, the voice behind Friendly City Foodie. Join me in celebrating the best food in Harrisonburg, Virginia and beyond.

The backstory…

My love for local food bloomed in a peach orchard on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in 2011. I discovered the juicy wonder of a peach fresh off the tree while working on the harvest team and managing the farm store for 4 summers. To minimize waste (and maximize my wallet), I began baking and selling peach pies using the bruised peaches that didn't make the cut for the store.

When the peach season ended, I joined an organic produce farm's harvest team north of the orchard, ran their farmers market stand, and turned unattractive harvests into gazpacho, big crunch salads, and tomato pies. 

As an undergrad at JMU, I became a shareholder in a cow and chicken collective, experiencing my first tastes of fresh milk and eggs. Working on the produce team at the Friendly City Food Co-op taught me more culinary uses for vegetables and fruits.

I honed my cooking skills in the farm-to-table kitchen of the Arthur Morgan School during a year-long teaching stint at the Quaker, Montessori-inspired boarding and day school in the mountains of North Carolina.  

For the past 7 years, I turned to a different kind of cultivation — teaching middle school English. My passion for food deepened as I reserved precious time for tending my home garden — rows of vegetable beds, berry bushes, fruit and nut trees, and flowers, treasuring the end of season preservation time of canning, freezing, and fermentation.

Friendly City Foodie is a catalog of my quest for the best eats in Harrisonburg and beyond.

Join me!