Mo' about Molasses and Local Food

The 10% Farm to Fork campaign is an initiative sponsored by the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, and the Golden Leaf Foundation. The campaign encourages participants to pledge to spend 10% of their weekly food purchases on local foods. We now have a local foods and sustainable agriculture advocate in our household, so I've joined the 10% campaign.

Today was a beautiful, sunny fall day in North Carolina, and we made several stops on our way to the mountains. I realized later that every place we visited had resulted in a purchase of local foods. First was the Shiloh General Store, an Amish store in Yadkin County. Not surprisingly they do not have a website, but their address is 5520 St. Paul Church Road, Hamptonville, NC, located off the Windsor Road exit of Highway 421, which is not far from the intersection of Interstate 77 and Highway 421. The Store carries many hard-to-find, old-fashioned type items, bulk grains, deli cheeses and meats, and even Amish hats. At the General Store, we purchased a loaf of sourdough bread (still warm in the bag), a jar of peach jam, a bag of gingerbread mix from the Old Mill of Guilford (near Greensoboro, NC) and a bag of stone ground corn meal mix from the Linney Water Mill of Union Grove, NC.

Next, we were pleased to find our favorite independent coffee/hot beverage shop open - Java Hills Coffee and Ice Cream, in Millers Creek. Judy does not typically open the shop on Saturdays, but due to the Brushy Mountain Apple Festival, she made an exception and was busy brewing up delicious drinks for her customers.

Just up the road from Java Hills, we enjoyed hot dogs at the Igloo Ice Cream & Sandwich Shop, recently written up in Our State Magazine.

After lunch, we headed to the Brushy Mountains in search of local apples. By a bit of serendipity we ended up at Tevepaugh Orchards (800 Vannoy Road, Moravian Falls), where we bought a bushel of wonderful Jonagold apples.

We wound up our local foods shopping at Mr. J.D. Taylor's molasses stand on the side of Highway 16, north of the community of Wilbar, where we purchased a quart of liquid happiness. Mr. Taylor, pictured here, has made molasses for fifty years. He proclaims that molasses is "good for you!" (which we already knew). Wait a minute...maybe he said, "Molasses ARE good for you." He sported a Cleveland Indians baseball cap, though he admitted that his team is "in the cellar" this year. (An earlier post, linked here, touches upon the topic of molasses and grammar.)

I think we contributed much more than 10% of our weekly food dollars to local food purchases for the upcoming week. I did not realize that this would be today's theme, or I would have taken more photos of our stops. I will plan to feature Judy's Java Hills in a future post. In the meantime, buy local!

Molasses

My kids have a byline for molasses: "They are so bad they're good." There is debate at our house about whether or not the word molasses is treated as a singular or plural noun. I tend to favor plural. But that's not to say that I won't occasionally lapse into a singular usage. I do like to refer to molasses as a "they." Quite a number of our kids' friends have had their first exposure to molasses at our house. We are sort of self-appointed molasses ambassadors. Ambassamolassadors, you might say. Once we realized that other families were not providing molasses to their kids, we became somewhat aggressive whenever we had kid-friends over at meal time. We would insist that they take at least a small spoonful. Some would resist, and we would cajole and plead and ultimately insist. Inevitably the looks on the kids' faces would range from skepticism to outright hostility upon viewing and smelling the black liquid on the spoon. We tried many times, but I don't think we ever had any true converts. Oh, what they were missing. There is nothing more delicious than a warm buttermilk biscuit, cut open and buttered, then drizzled generously with rich, dark, sweet molasses. Mmmmm....they are so bad, they're good.