Get beautiful homegrown tomatoes, peppers, squash and many other kinds of produce, along with handmade tamales, cinnamon rolls, bread and more at Farm Stand Fridays, from 3 to 6 p.m., at Ranch Foods Direct! This is a chance to personally meet a few of the people who grow your food… including Grant Goldberg, owner of Twisted Pines Farm…

Grant (above) is as passionate about reconnecting people with their food as he is about growing it. He and his wife, Alison, operate Twisted Pines Farm, raising chickens, pigs, turkeys and cattle along with two young sons, Zachary, 2½, and Ryker, 1, on the east side of Black Forest. “Four times a year we offer Chickens 101, a 3-hour workshop on the farm that covers everything you need to know about raising chickens, and every fall we put on a butchering class that’s 100 percent hands-on. That’s fun. We have a great time doing that. It’s a first for a lot of folks. We get people of all ages, everyone from 4-Hers to a 79-year-old who told us she had never killed anything in her life.” How did she feel by the end of the class? “Proud, I think,” he says. “I call it getting real with your food. That’s why we do what we do.”

Grant left a lucrative but unsatisfying job to farm full-time; Alison works one day a week as an orthopedic nurse at Penrose Hospital. “We get a lot of customers through Ranch Foods Direct, and they are the kind of people who want to go talk to the guy who raised their food,” Grant says. “It’s great for us. It’s the kind of business that restores our faith in humanity, because they care about local, and they appreciate what we do.”

Twisted Pines chickens, sold frozen as whole birds, are available in the freezer section at Ranch Foods Direct, $4.99 per pound.