by Hanna Raskin . photos by Naomi Johnson

Lamb is no longer a euphemism for wimpy shrink-wrapped muttonchops with a side of mint jelly. While the traditional lamb market has been in steady decline since the early 1970s, trend spotters say grass-fed, sustainably raised lamb could help rejuvenate demand for the long-neglected meat. The Conde Nast foodie website Epicurious.com declared lamb “the new pork” for 2010. And while the heyday of Julia Child’s lamb stew may be long gone, the Food Network’s celeb chef Rachael Ray seems to love lamb—from chops to kabobs to Moroccan chili—on her show 30 Minute Meals. Trendy dishes like lamb spring rolls are showing up on big-city restaurant menus, and locally, you can find a lamb T-bone or a lamb ragout at places like Zambra and Table.

Photo by Brent Fleury

by Jess McCuan

Cindy Weeks knows her clients well. Probably because she was once one of them. Today, Weeks, 56, is the picture of the polished white-collar professional—well dressed, well educated, pulling up to her North Asheville home in a Subaru. But her life didn’t always look like this. In her mid-20s, Weeks was a single mother with two toddlers, waitressing at an upscale club near a racetrack in urban Pittsburgh. Her four-year marriage had fallen apart, and she was nearly evicted from her home. It was sometime during this rocky period that she realized waitressing simply wouldn’t cut it. She couldn’t survive, much less support her children well. “There is this other world out there,” she recalls thinking. “I need to set my life up so that it works better than this.”

by Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

Kathy Milner is no Betty Crocker. Not exactly, anyway. The 51-year-old native New Yorker does like to cook, and she occasionally bakes. But Milner, who has a degree in chemistry and worked for the chemical giant DuPont, doesn’t see her sugar-free foods business, American Quality Foods, as a celebration of her domestic skills. In fact, it’s more like a chemistry experiment. A lucrative one. AQF, which occupies a 17,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Mills River, ships product mixes to some 6,000 customers nationwide—places like nursing homes, hospitals and casinos—that cater to diabetic and weight-conscious clients. With revenues of $4.2 million last year and projected income of $5 million in 2010, Milner, the president, has turned sugar-free cake mixes into one of the fastest-growing private food companies in the country.

by Ursula Gullow . photos by Matt Rose

Kathryn Temple hasn’t always been a professional actor. But in a way, she has been putting herself on display for years, creating introspective narrative oil paintings for more than a decade. The opportunity to act fell in her lap four years ago when she was asked to play a role in the NC Stage production of Live From WVL Radio Theatre: It’s A Wonderful Life. This month, Temple, 37, gets to show off both her painting and her acting skills. She will exhibit a collection of paintings in the lobby of downtown Asheville’s NC Stage Company in conjunction with Ruth, a play that opens July 1 and in which Temple stars as the leading lady.

Story and photos by Naomi Johnson

For Lucia Daugherty, it’s all about planting seeds—in every sense. She’s sitting among the thriving purple cabbages at Pisgah View Community Peace Garden, which she co-founded and manages with her husband Bob White. Just three years ago, this space at the center of Asheville’s largest public housing complex was an abandoned, hard-packed baseball diamond littered with empty bottles and condom wrappers. Today, it’s a lush urban oasis of vegetables, flowers, and neatly mulched paths with fruit trees and climbing vines.

by Jess McCuan . photo by Brent Fleury

Anna Warren has never been a techie. The 41-year-old has never been particularly gadget-happy, nor was she spending an unusual amount of time, as a stay-at-home mom, checking email or surfing the web. “Last year, I didn’t even know the word code. What is code?,” says Warren, who launched a website, Jobbitz.com, last May. “It was a completely new realm.”

What she did know was that people in Asheville were looking for work. People she knew were, in some cases, living on just a few dollars—and there didn’t seem to be a good way to connect them with people who had work to offer. Craigslist, sure, but there are always plenty of scams there. The local papers are a good place to find full-time jobs, but Warren didn’t see a good place to post small jobs—things like yard work and babysitting and computer research help. Last spring she gathered up some tech-savvy friends and launched Jobbitz.com, a site where it’s free to post an odd job—say cleaning the gutters or chopping a tree. Since the site launched, Ashevilleans have posted more than 700 jobs, which Warren estimates have generated around $200,000 for the local economy.

by Mick Kelly . photos by Matt Rose

There’s nothing fancy about Laura Collins’ everyday look. Nor should there be. She spent nearly 20 years in the ministry, 16 of those as a Presbyterian minister. Now, the 47-year-old freelance writer and editor can basically spend most days in her pajamas. “It’s embarrassing, but it’s true,” she says.

This spring, though, Collins decided she needed a change. She signed up for an unusual graduate degree, a masters from UNC-Asheville in liberal arts with a concentration in Climate Change and Society. She wanted to sharpen up her writing skills. But it was really an effort to “sharpen my intellectual edges a little,” says Collins, a single mom with an 11-year-old son.

by Melanie McGee Bianchi

April Dennis is no drill sergeant. “I am not a yeller,” says the 45-year-old personal trainer and co-owner of The Fire Personal Training Studio in East Asheville. But she can be intense when it comes to her own workouts or helping her clients shed pounds with exercises like boxing, jump rope and kettlebell swings. People appreciate her enthusiasm in the gym. “Afterwards, they’ll say, ‘Oh, I had so much fun… but I’m so sore I can hardly move,’” she says.

by Ursula Gullow and Jess McCuan . photo courtesy of The Nine

It’s high season for wedding photographers. And in Western North Carolina, there are plenty of them. Until 2008, Asheville wedding photographer Regina Holder ran a site called AshevilleBridal.com, and in 2004, there were only 25 photographers registered. In 2008, there were 115. “Every day, you hear of somebody else that’s new in town,” says Holder, who has a degree in photojournalism from UNC-Chapel Hill. “If [a person has] a good eye, they’ll start shooting weddings.”