Chef Ashlie Head started making pasta after leaving a career that no longer fulfilled her. A year later, Mangia Y’all has grown into organic handmade pasta, farm to table meal prep and the kind of food Ashlie hopes can take people somewhere familiar.

By Hearthara Live

Chef Ashlie Head can make a pretty convincing argument for ordering the ravioli.

She likes playing with fillings and dough, which means ravioli gives her room to do what she seems to enjoy most in the kitchen: experiment. One of her favorites began with a dough made with squid ink and blue spirulina. She filled it with crab and salmon, then finished the dish with a lemon Prosecco sauce.

That should tell you fairly quickly that Mangia Y’all is not simply selling bags of pasta.

Ashlie makes dried organic pastas, ravioli and lasagnas, but she has also built a farm to table meal prep business for individuals and families who want fresh food without having to do all of the work themselves. She sources Georgia ingredients, works directly with a local farm and continues developing dishes around what is available as the seasons change.

The pasta, though, is where everything began.

Not very long ago, Ashlie was working in a dental office. She had no idea that playing around with pasta at home was about to change her career.

From the dental office to the pasta table

Ashlie spent years helping people as a dental assistant, and there were parts of the work she genuinely loved. What she did not love was spending her days stuck in an office dealing with insurance.

Eventually, the lack of fulfillment became difficult to ignore, so she left.

For a few weeks, Ashlie looked for another job. Somewhere in the middle of that search, she started playing with pasta.

Her family liked it. Then her friends liked it. Then the neighbors liked it. At some point, enough people were telling her the same thing that Ashlie decided to find out whether strangers might like it too.

She took her fresh organic pasta to the farmers market in LaFayette, Georgia, where she met a woman named Mackenzie who looked at what Ashlie was making and apparently saw the future a little faster than Ashlie did.

“Oh girl start cranking out some pasta, you’re going to be a hit,” Ashlie remembers her saying.

Mackenzie was right.

Ashlie began selling out, moving close to 30 to 40 pounds of pasta a week. Suddenly, the woman who had been searching for another job was becoming Chef Ashlie.

Pasta was always somewhere in the dream

The career change may have happened quickly, but the dream behind it had been around much longer.

Ashlie spent much of her youth in restaurants and hospitality. Food was familiar territory long before Mangia Y’all existed, and one person in particular shaped the way she thinks about feeding people.

Her grandfather.

“My grandfather is the reason I held on to this dream for nearly 30 years,” she says.

She remembers his love of cooking meals for his family and the feeling those meals created around the table. That is what Ashlie wants her own food to carry.

She wants it to be nutritious, certainly, but she also wants someone to taste it and feel as though they have been transported somewhere familiar. Back home, around a family table, in “abuelo’s kitchen.”

That memory helps explain why Ashlie talks about feeding people differently than someone simply describing a product line. For her, food is supposed to do something. It gathers people, creates memories and gives someone a little care in the middle of an otherwise busy day.

Mangia Y’all is her way of doing that professionally.

The ingredients stay close to home

Ashlie describes Mangia Y’all as farm to table, and she has built sourcing relationships to support that approach.

She works with Chickamauga Creek Farms for fresh produce, meat and other ingredients, with a focus on products from Georgia. The flour she uses for her pasta is USDA organic flour sourced from a farm in Danielsville, Georgia.

That relationship with local agriculture is important to what Ashlie wants the business to become.

Her mission is straightforward: farm fresh meals that are healthy and affordable.

Meal prep became a natural extension of that idea. Ashlie knows plenty of people want to eat better. She also knows many of those same people have absolutely no desire to spend their limited free time planning meals, shopping, chopping vegetables and standing over the stove.

So she does it for them.

Mangia Y’all prepares farm to table meals for working individuals and families, giving customers another option when they want something thoughtfully prepared but do not have the time to make it themselves.

Ashlie has a name for the meal prep line too.

ADULTABLES.

Because apparently adulthood includes discovering that somebody else making dinner is one of life’s great luxuries.

*Handmade Super Food Ravioli from Mangia Y’all*

Order the ravioli, but don’t ignore the lasagna

Ashlie’s personal recommendation is the ravioli.

The customers have spoken on another matter.

Lasagna wins.

“Lasagnas hands down!!!” is how Ashlie describes the bestseller, with enough enthusiasm that arguing seems unnecessary.

The contrast between the two favorites tells you something useful about Mangia Y’all. Ashlie loves the creative side of pasta making. Ravioli lets her experiment with color, fillings, sauces and combinations that may change with the season.

Customers, meanwhile, keep coming back to one of the ultimate comfort foods.

There is room for both.

As fall approaches, Ashlie is already thinking about butternut squash ravioli. She is confident enough in that one to make a comparison.

Her version, she says, is better than Trader Joe’s.

We appreciate a chef willing to pick a fight.

Seasonal cooking is important to Ashlie because the ingredients available from farms naturally change throughout the year. Instead of fighting that rhythm, Mangia Y’all gets to change with it.

That means customers have a reason to keep asking what she is making now.

She is more than the pasta lady

One of the things that surprises customers most is discovering how much Ashlie can do beyond pasta.

She finds that funny.

“I think they’re more taken back that I can actually Chef it up and do some pretty cool stuff with food.”

The pasta may have introduced people to Mangia Y’all, but Ashlie’s experience in restaurants and hospitality goes much further back than the business itself.

The meal prep side gives her an opportunity to show more of that range, working with proteins, produce and complete dishes rather than staying entirely inside the pasta category.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that Ashlie’s future in food is not going to be limited to what she can sell.

Kindness belongs in the business plan

Ask Ashlie what she is proudest of and she does not immediately mention selling out at the farmers market, building a customer base or becoming a chef.

She talks about helping people.

“The most thing I’m proudest of most is my commitment to helping others,” she says.

That commitment now extends beyond Mangia Y’all. Ashlie serves as Director of Community Outreach for Hearthara Culinary, a leadership role that gives her another avenue to use food in service of the community.

It also gives important context to something Ashlie identifies as one of her biggest successes: the opportunity to work with Chef Sara and to reach more people through that work.

For Ashlie, the significance is not simply being connected to another culinary organization. It is having a larger platform for something she already believes deeply.

She believes kindness is a choice and wonders what might happen if more people made small acts of kindness part of their everyday lives.

Food is one of the ways Ashlie makes that choice herself.

Cooking can be service. Meal prep can make a difficult week a little easier for a busy family. A thoughtfully prepared meal can make someone feel cared for, and food can bring people together when a community needs it most.

That philosophy is part of Mangia Y’all, and now it is part of the community work Ashlie is helping lead through Hearthara Culinary.

There are businesses built around products, and then there are businesses where the product becomes a way for the owner to express something larger.

Mangia Y’all increasingly feels like the second kind.

Markets gave Mangia Y’all its first audience

Ashlie’s farmers market beginning remains an important part of the business.

Markets gave her a place to find out whether people outside her immediate circle would actually buy what she was making.

They did.

Now festivals and markets give her something else she values: the opportunity to watch people enjoy themselves.

“We all work so hard each and every day,” she says. “Making time for fun is always important.”

That applies to Ashlie too.

When she is not cooking, she says she enjoys “doing as little as possible,” followed quickly by a list that suggests she may not be particularly good at it.

There is music, very bad karaoke, hiking, the beach and holiday themed crafts.

Her motivation comes from several places, including her love of food, her faith and Evangeline, whom Ashlie simply calls “my Evangeline.”

And when the business gets difficult, she keeps moving.

The pastabilities are endless

Yes, Ashlie made the pasta pun herself.

We are keeping it.

“The pastabilities are endless!!!!”

Eventually, Chef Ashlie would love a cozy little restaurant of her own.

For now, Mangia Y’all can be found at Chickamauga Creek Farms, with Ashlie working on additional locations around Northwest Georgia and Chattanooga. She is continuing to grow the pasta business while developing ADULTABLES for working people who want meal prep tailored to their needs.

At the same time, her position as Director of Community Outreach for Hearthara Culinary gives her another place to pursue something that has clearly become inseparable from the way she thinks about food: feeding people and helping people belong in the same conversation.

There is a lot happening for a business that began because a former dental assistant started playing with pasta while looking for another job.

Ashlie’s advice to anyone sitting on an idea of their own is predictably enthusiastic.

“DO IT!!!”

She does not promise that it will be graceful.

“You’ll cry, scream, loose your mind,” she says, before getting to the important part: ask for help, find guidance and keep going.

Ashlie did.

Nearly 30 years after her grandfather helped plant a dream she never quite let go of, she is back in the world of food as Chef Ashlie, feeding people for a living and finding new ways to use that work in service of her community.

The pasta sells out. The lasagna has its loyalists. The butternut squash ravioli is coming for Trader Joe’s. ADULTABLES is giving busy people another way to put a thoughtfully prepared meal on the table.

And somewhere in all of it is still the feeling Ashlie has been chasing from the beginning: food made with enough care that, for a few minutes, it feels a little like coming home.

Meet Mangia Y’all: Handmade Pasta, Georgia Farms and a Dream Nearly 30 Years in the Making