Nourishing Our Community

By Gwendolyn Marie Roach

I married into a family where sharing good food together is the great delight of life. I set out to learn to cook when Graham and I got married in 2003. The learning curve was steep, and there were some tears over my earliest efforts, but I soon found myself loving being in the kitchen, and learning to create new flavors.  Over the course of time, cooking has grown to become my passion.

In 2009, I began learning quite a bit about how food has a direct and powerful affect on how the body operates.  Spurred on by health challenges, I started to change some of our patterns of food consumption, changing gradually from buying and eating all commercially-produced supermarket food to sourcing a larger and larger portion of our diet from local farmers producing whole foods naturally. I had already been learning a whole lot about cooking, and I started to learn more and more about cooking truly wholesome, scratch-made, traditional foods without processed ingredients.

On New Years Day, 2010, as we looked forward to a new decade, we found ourselves dreaming about a different direction in life. The dream that was born in us that day was to raise our family close to Graham’s relatives in North Carolina, and to become producers of good, clean, high quality food, as well as to share our passion for healthy living with the community around us.  We spent that year doing a whole lot of research on small-scale sustainable farming. Reading Joel Salatin’s books You Can Farm and Pastured Poultry Profits got the wheels spinning for us, and we got excited about getting started.

In early 2011, we purchased our farm and in June of the same year we packed up and left good work and good friends in Houston, TX,  to become farmers in North Carolina.  Since last summer, we have been getting our hands dirty by experimenting with raising gardens, chickens and pigs. We plan to launch our farming business this spring—starting with selling pasture raised broiler chickens and eggs, and naturally grown produce direct to friends, and also at the new Old Salem Cobblestone Farmers Market, a producers-only market on Saturday mornings that will be run by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.

Our search for a farm name actually helped us to clarify the vision we had for our business. As we searched for something inspired, I looked to the name of our city, Winston-Salem for inspiration.  Words having to do with Salem, or “peace” for a farm name seemed too hippy-ish to describe us.  My good friend, Amy, had recently given the name Winston to her new kitten, and I realized I really liked that name.  I looked up Winston on a baby names site to see what it means—joyful stone. That was nice, but not very meaningful.  I saw that a variation on the name was Winstead.  Oohh!!  That caught my attention! Winstead reminded me of homestead. I checked out the definition: “friend’s farm”.  I like that. I really like that.

I like this meaning, because it would be such an honor for people to sit around the table with those they love and be able to say that their friend raised the foods on the table. We are passionate about restoring the connections between eaters and growers.  We want our farm to be open for customers and friends to come by and see how their food is grown, and we want people to enjoy the fruits of our land and labor.  Our mission is to grow high quality food to nourish our community.

I also love how by just being in relationship with others, we shape how they think about food and nourishment.  Amy has been telling me how her perspective on food is being shaped by the short time we’ve been friends. She and her husband watched the film Fresh on our recommendation, and she said that “something clicked” that helped her understand more about what the movement toward local, fresh food was all about.  She described to some young friends that this movement was a snowballing of people learning more about the effects of how food is grown and distributed, making choices to buy natural and local, and producing products that treat the land and the body with respect. The momentum of the movement is increasing.  We’re so excited to begin producing top quality food just at the time when more and more people are starting to seek it out for reasons of taste, animal welfare, nutrition, and environmental stewardship.  Our dreams are big, and our land is a canvas of possibilities.

Gwen and her husband Graham are new farmers at WinsteadFarm in Winston Salem, NC. They have a 18 month old son, Ephraim who loves chickens. Gwen is a homemaker, and a voracious student of cooking and nutrition.  She loves to sing and play music, read, and travel.  She blogs at: http://littlebitesoflife.wordpress.com/.  

Pasta, the Quilt of Comfort Foods

By Joel DiGloria

Well, here we are again discussing food.  The song from The Sound of Music, "My Favorite Things," is playing in my head.  I enjoy cooking/baking, trying new recipes, tasting new things, but most of all I enjoy feeding people.  When someone really enjoys eating something I've made, it gives me a great sense of satisfaction.

So, we begin.  I've been thinking about homemade pasta.  When I talk to people about making pasta, they seem to think it's a complicated gourmet food, but really, it's quite simple.  I remember as a boy seeing long noodles draped over a wooden drying rack or laid flat on a clean white sheet on top of one of the beds.  It wasn't made all the time, but frequently enough to be normal.  Dry pasta is great, all pasta is comfort food, but there's something pretty amazing about homemade pasta.  All I have is an old-fashioned, hand-cranked pasta machine that makes either wide or narrow fettucini style noodles, but that's really all you need.

In the old days, my great grandmother often rolled the pasta dough by hand, then cut the noodles by hand, as well.  I use semolina flour mixed with all purpose flour to get the texture I like.  (More on Semolina from our friends as Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semolina ).  Semolina flour is often available at your local grocery store, but you can definitely find it at Whole Foods-type markets.

In some later posts, we can discuss various homemade sauces for our pasta, though I rarely measure for them. The three sauces we most often make are tomato, alfredo, and pesto.  I've also made a very nice white wine-based clam sauce on occasion, but I digress.  

Pasta dough is a simple, somewhat tough dough that doesn't rise but needs to rest after it's kneaded (we all need to be needed, don't we?).  So, what else to say but don't be afraid to experiment.  I find in baking, measurements must be precise, but with cooking, all that really matters is that it tastes good.  Buon appetito!

Fresh Pasta

2 cups all purpose flour

2 cups semolina flour

6 large eggs

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 pinch of salt

Mix by hand or on slow to medium in a stand mixer.  Knead on the counter for a few minutes, then let it rest up to thirty minutes.  Roll, cut, lay out to dry.  It doesn't really need to dry for too long, but can do so for a few hours.  Any longer and it should be refrigerated due to the eggs.  Fresh pasta doesn't take as long to cook as conventional dry, store bought pasta.

Joel DiGloria is a realtor with a passion for feeding people, caring for babies, and playing the saxophone.  Since moving to North Carolina from Alaska more than thirteen years ago, he and his family have made a concerted effort to get back to their Italian roots.  He is an internationally licensed chaplain and plans to work in the nursery at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem and volunteer in their chaplaincy services later this spring.

Notes from a Recovering Sicilian

By Joel DiGloria

Food, one of the common denominators of humankind. I am 100% Italian, so my whole life I have been schooled on the two "F's", or the two basic pillars of the Italian culture, Family and Food. I remember meals at my grandmother's house on Sunday afternoons. Everybody would gather in the kitchen stealing bites of braciole (pronounced bra-zshee-ole-a, thin strips of beef rolled around a mixture of Italian cheese, bread crumbs, and eggs, then seared and finished by placing them in a pot of tomato sauce), or dipping Italian bread in the sauce and generally getting scolded for being in the way. For us kids, it was a constant barrage of great aunts pinching our cheeks and saying things like, bella (beautiful), or faccia (naughty). Then we would all sit at a big table and eat a meal of several courses for hours. Once we were done, the adults would retire to the living room and sip amaretto or anisette (licorice flavor liqueur), while we played. After about an hour or so, just when we started to feel like we could breathe again after ingesting all that food, my grandmother would ask if anyone was hungry, and she would offer to make a sandwich or something. All that to say, food is still a big part of our lives, and feeding people brings a great deal of satisfaction. I will be contributing food related anecdotes from time to time here, and ironically, for my first I'm attaching a non-Italian recipe! Here's my version of key lime pie. Buon appetito!

This is the 1999 American Pie Council’s National Pie Championship’s first place winner in the Quick and Easy Category.  Garnish each piece with a slice of lime and a dollop of whipped cream or whipped topping, if you like.

Ingredients

5 egg yolks, beaten

1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

1/2 cup key lime juice

1 (9 inch) prepared graham cracker crust

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).

2. Combine the egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk and lime juice. Mix well. Pour into unbaked graham cracker shell.

3. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes. Allow to cool. Top with whipped topping and garnish with lime slices, if desired.

That's the basic recipe, but:

Here's my take on it. Instead of a pre-made crust, I take 1 1/2 C graham crackers, 6 T butter melted, and 1/8 C of sugar.  Mix and press into an 8" spring form. Whip 1 pint of cream and top. Also, for a bit of texture and zing, I zest a lime and add 1/2 to the batter and 1/2 as a garnish sprinkled over the whipped cream.

Joel DiGloria is a realtor with a passion for feeding people, caring for babies, and playing the saxophone.  Since moving to North Carolina from Alaska more than thirteen years ago, he and his family have made a concerted effort to get back to their Italian roots.  He is an internationally licensed chaplain and plans to work in the nursery at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem and volunteer in their chaplaincy services later this spring.