(birds call) (gravel crunches) (uplifting music) (lettuce rustles) (uplifting music) - My name's Peter Barrett.

I live in the Hudson Valley and I cook a lot and experiment heavily with all the things I grow in the garden, and I teach people about it through writing and classes that used to be in person and are now via Zoom or other methods.

My mother and her parents, when I was a kid, they all had gardens.

In fact, my grandparents had his and hers gardens with different specialties.

So I grew up, you know, helping my mom in the garden at a young age, even if helping basically meant eating all the peas and string beans faster than she could pick them.

For me, gardening, it's a number of different things.

It's a way to get outside.

Like I don't have to drive anywhere.

It's right outside my door.

It's exercise, it's engagement above all with the food that I grow at every stage of its development.

A garden allows you to develop a relationship with all of the different plants throughout their lifecycle.

It's also better food.

When you cut a head of lettuce, bring it inside, wash it, spin it, dress it, and eat it within five minutes, it is a different food than a head of lettuce that has been trucked across the country.

It's like a concert hall versus an MP3, or, you know, use your metaphor.

The resolution that the amount of information in a fresh, just-picked green food is completely different, and growing up, because of my mother's garden, the sense memories that I have of certain foods, the touchstones of flavor that I learned at a very young age are of food that was that fresh.

And if you can instill that in kids, they never unlearn it.

I grow all the normal stuff.

My current favorite unusual crop is sesame.

I have a whole bed of it.

I love having my own sesame seeds.

This year I'm gonna have enough to do some more experimenting.

Today I'm making a chicory pesto that my friend Richard Zukowsky who invented it called green mash.

It's made much like classic basil pesto, but using some form of chicory.

And you can use any greens, honestly.

(knife chops) Plants evolved bitterness as a defense mechanism to keep them from being eaten.

So the bitterness of chicory is a defense mechanism and also part of what makes it so wonderful to eat, provided you learn how to kind of tame that bitterness.

You can mitigate bitterness with fat, like olive oil, with protein, we're gonna use some pine nuts, salt, and acidity, so lemon juice or vinegar.

So I start by pounding up sliced garlic and pine nuts.

I add a little salt and I add whatever acid.

You can use lemon juice.

I will more often than not use a little homemade vinegar because that's a product that I can make here at home.

Adding a little mustard to this is another way of emulsifying it better and adding a different kind of sharpness to it.

Then I start adding shredded greens and a little bit of olive oil, and work that for awhile, and then I add a little more.

So then it's really just a question of grinding and adding and tasting occasionally to check your salt levels, and then adding sufficient oil to bring it to the level of creaminess that you want.

(uplifting music) You can do it in a food processor.

When I have time I really like to use my suribachi, which is a ceramic bowl that's been combed on the inside so it has a serrated interior which makes a great grinding surface.

And so by the end of it you end up with some larger chunks, you end up with some completely liquefied, so you get a nice kind of continuum of texture which you can only get with a mortar and pestle as opposed to a food processor where everything gets cut to roughly the same size.

I grow a lot of different kinds of Italian chicory.

Red, green, light green, dark green, things that look like dandelions, things that look like radicchio.

They're beautiful, they're super cold tolerant.

Depending on where you live you can absolutely grow them year-round.

And bitterness is a flavor that I think is underrated in this country.

I think other cultures use it more effectively, and when people learn how to incorporate it into their food, it can really open up and expand your culinary horizons.

Bitterness is a wonderful counterweight to something like fatty meat.

It really cuts through the fat.

It gives this wonderful, bright treble note to that kind of really rich meaty umami.

But it's great with anything.

It works with vegan lentils and it works with the biggest steak you've ever seen.

It really helps balance out a plate of food.

As someone who works at home and who already has a mature garden, the pandemic affected me very little, and I'm incredibly lucky.

But I think the great silver lining of it is that a lot of people who have previously been way too busy have had time to cook.

People who couldn't bake sourdough before now know how.

People who didn't have gardens before, there are a lot more who have gardens now.

There's nothing like a serious emergency to make you focus on what matters most, which is food, water, shelter, and company.

So as dark and dismal as the situation is, a lot of people are gonna come out of this with a much more evolved relationship to their food and to the daily practice of preparing their own food, and I think that's wonderful, and I think we should all sort of keep an eye on that as being maybe something that makes our society quite a lot better.

(uplifting music)