In this episode, farmer and author Will Bonsall makes Succotash, a simple, nourishing, and delicious meal that triumphantly proves you can grow all the ingredients to make dinner right in your own garden. To learn more about Will Bonsall's work, visit: Scatterseed Project: https://www.scatterseedproject.org
Kitchen Vignettes is a farm-to-table video blog by Aube Giroux. She is a passionate organic gardener and home cook who likes to share the stories of how food gets to our dinner plates. She was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in 2014 and 2015 and won Saveur Magazine's 2012 Best Food Blog award in the video category. For more video stories: http://kitchenvignettes.blogspot.com/
PBS Food celebrates a love of food and cooking with the best recipes and fresh ingredients. No gimmicks, just food. Find recipes from your favorite cooking shows and more: http://www.pbs.org/food
My name's Will Bonsall and I farm in Industry, Maine.
I wasn't born and raised on a farm. I was born and raised in a mill town
where pretty much everything on our table came from the grocery store.
Corn mostly came out of a can.
And special things like corn on the cob were a bit of a luxury.
It was when I would go to visit my grandparents on their home in the country where Grandpa had a big garden.
And when we stayed with them, the table would be groaning with platters of corn on the cob
and big sliced tomatoes.
And that struck me as the epitome of luxury.
And that to me was far more than having a fine car or clothes or something.
I think that left a very big impression on me and was a major factor in my wanting to grow all this myself.
My favorite feature of farming is that the earth puts out such an abundance, just a flood of food.
And so being able to somehow harness that and put that on my own plate,
it's just really quite self-centered, the whole thing.
A lot of the things that we eat here, Donald Trump can't afford to eat, Bill Gates can't afford to eat.
They're not in the marketplace.
I'm fabulously wealthy. I haven't got a pot to piss in, but I'm very, very wealthy.
As far as food goes, the sky's the limit.
One of my favorite shell bean varieties is a multi-purpose pulled bean from Oaxaca, Mexico called jemines.
It's one of my favorites because it's a multi-purpose bean.
By that I mean it's excellent as a green bean, as a string bean,
but it yields so heavily that you can't begin to keep up with it for that.
And so the ones that go by make excellent shell beans.
And the ones that get by that also make a very good dry bean.
So it's a wonderful three-purpose bean.
Well, today I'm making a traditional Native American dish.
It's made of shell beans, sweet corn, and I usually also add ripe peppers and summer squash or zucchini to it.
The peppers take just a few minutes to fillet them, clean the seeds out,
which I save, by the way, because this is a variety that I bred myself.
I save all the seeds I can from it.
Then get the shell bean shelled and in some water and oil in them so they're getting tender.
And take a zucchini and dice it up.
And I'll usually cook all of these things, at least pre-cook them, separately,
mainly because they may not have quite the same cooking time.
So I like to add them together when they're nearly done.
Then, once all these things are cooked enough,
then I'll simply put them all together, a little bit of oil,
and continue cooking them a little bit longer, and then it's done.
