From a Backyard Garden in Ayden to Your Pantry: the álarita Story

People ask us all the time how a little family in Ayden, North Carolina ended up making salsa. The short answer: we had way too many tomatoes. The longer answer is our favorite story to tell.

It started with a garden

When our family settled on a piece of land here in Ayden, it came with room for a real garden — and we planted a big one. Too big, it turned out. We had more vegetables than one family could ever eat, so we loaded up and started selling the extra at the local farmers market.

Trouble was, everybody at the market had vegetables. To stand out, we needed something nobody else had. That’s when La Rita’s brother, Ryan, handed us a salsa recipe he’d been working on. We tweaked it, tasted it, tweaked it again as a family — and people lined up for it.

Years of fresh salsa and folding tables

For a good stretch we made fresh salsa and sold it from coolers in plastic containers — at the Pitt County farmers market over in Greenville, and at shows we still love, like Mistletoe Magic in Morehead City and Smoke on the Water in Washington. We learned a lot at those folding tables: to stop making every flavor under the sun and double down on the ones people came back for, and that good food with a friendly face carries you a long way.

Mom put it on the shelf

Fresh salsa is wonderful, but it doesn’t keep. So La Rita — “Mom,” and the namesake behind álarita — earned her canning license so she could make our salsas shelf stable in jars. That opened a whole new door: now you’ll find álarita on shelves around Eastern NC, at the Market at Cedar Point, the Emerald Isle Wine Shop, and the Davenport Market — and right here, shipped to your door.

And then came the skillet meals

A while back, Mom started going to a camp up near Shelby where folks learn to get ready for whatever life throws at them — including how to make good, simple meals that store for the long haul. Then Hurricane Helene rolled through the mountains while she and Dad were up there, and they saw firsthand why that kind of know-how matters. Those lessons became our skillet dinners — one-pot meals built to sit in your pantry until the night you need an easy, hearty supper on the table.

Still our family’s food

Every jar and pouch still comes from the same place it always has — our family, cooking the food we’d put on our own table. Thanks for being part of the story.

And if you haven’t tasted álarita yet, there’s no better time to start. Click the button below, pull up a chair, and let our little family feed yours — one good meal at a time. Welcome to the table.