Cooking on the Biggest Little Farm
An interview with Molly Chester of Ventura County
This week I’m starting a series of interviews with cooks who wrote some of the books in my California Fall Cookbook Roundup. First up is Molly Chester, author of The Apricot Lane Farms Cookbook. You may know Molly from the popular documentary The Biggest Little Farm, which chronicled her and her husband, John’s, work developing a small sustainable farm in Ventura County. Like the movie, the book also gives us a peak into life at the farm, through photos, essays, and graphics. But the real draw is the recipes, which were developed by Molly (a former chef) and her culinary team on the farm. Molly and I chatted about the book— and her history with food and home cooking—earlier this year. She shared her ways of stocking her kitchen so it’s easy to cook for her family, and she shared a recipe from the book, which you’ll find below. Here’s what she told me, condensed and edited for clarity:
Molly Chester
I was born in Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, and then I was raised mostly in Atlanta. I lived there until I was 24, when I met John and then moved up to Baltimore.
When I was little, my mom always cooked. She would make a home-cooked meal every night. However, she had kind of succumbed to ‘80s processed foods to a certain degree. She was a stay-at-home mom, and my dad was a teacher, so there wasn't a huge financial support there. So, she did a lot of meatloaf and burgers and things like that, and she would use a lot of frozen or canned foods. But she took a lot of care and love to make sure that we were gathered around the table. And I did kind of grow up on her counter. There was one canister in the kitchen that was my own, and I could pull toys and stuff out of it as I sat on the counter while she was cooking.
My grandmother lived on my aunt's farm, and I'm not a person with tons and tons of childhood memories, but the time spent on her farm is seared into my head. There were grapes on this trellis, and I can remember the smell of the cows and the smell of the cut grass—and there were peacocks next door that I could hear.
So, that was obviously in me. But I grew up in suburbia, and my parents really weren't very connected to nature. My dad loved national parks, that kind of wild nature. My parents planted strawberries one time, but I remember I was the only one going out back to look at the strawberries; nobody else really cared. But my mom does love farmers’ markets, and so there were times she would take me. I was one of those people who would become obsessed, where it was just like, I like farmers’ markets, so I will go a farmers’ market every single week, and that's what I would do. I dive all in—which is something that probably annoys some people, but it's also just in my fundamental nature. I go all in.
When I was in high school, my mom would very graciously pack my lunches, and they had a lot of, like, Kudos bars and Cheetos and different things. And I noticed from a very young age that food did affect how I felt. At nine I decided I was a vegetarian (which ended up being kind of the thing that didn't help my health). I would sometimes tell my mom, “I'm gonna go in and cook and pack my own lunch.” And I would chop up little vegetables and things for salads and put it in my bag. But I didn't cook a lot—I didn't really cook until I went to college.
Then, when I moved to Baltimore—when I met John—I was kind of lonely and was also struggling with different health issues. So, I started turning to the kitchen. I used cooking as something that kept me busy. And I would hang out at the health food stores. John also introduced me to growing my own food. We planted a rather large home garden together, and I was just pulling things out of there and trying to experiment with them. I remember a lot of snap peas and zucchini and things like that that were fun and inspiring.
Then, when I finished a project I was working on, I said, “I think I'm going to culinary school.” I went to New York and went to the Natural Gourmet Institute of Health and Culinary Arts. The impetus for me wasn't to be the next Top Chef, it was that I was fascinated by how food affects the way that we feel.
Culinary school great because it was 60 percent in the kitchen learning to cook and then 40 percent learning the health-supportive aspects of the food. At that point, I was still a vegetarian (I think I had maybe started eating a little fish), and the school was actually founded in macrobiotics. That really affected my cooking in a lot of ways. My first experience in the kitchen was from a perspective of cooking vegetables—grains and beans and things like that. So, I really know the realm of a vegetarian palate. And when you add meat into that, you kind of have more expansion than if you go the other way around. So, if anything, meat is where I've had to learn—and continue to learn.
Then, I was given Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, which introduced me to the concept of traditional foods and how native cultures would cook. And that just rang every single one of my bells. I just was fascinated. And I started making that the foundation for how I looked at food. The reason we should be honoring these native cultures that stayed in connection with Mother Nature is because it's really Mother Nature who is the ultimate chef—the one who gives us the menu.
We started going to different farmers looking for the types of foods that I wanted to cook with, and we couldn't find really great eggs. I didn't want soy in the feed, because I'm allergic to soy, and I wanted it to be done without cutting any corners. I love when you can really have Mother Nature drive the highest experience of each one of the foods that you're working with. That is what produces a great dish. And we're just sort of in between; we're the messengers of something greater.
So, we said, “What if we raise our own chickens?” And then we ended up finding our partners, which blew the idea into like a much bigger sphere that we weren't anticipating and starting our farm. But our first product that we produced was our eggs—they are still a signature product of ours.
Being on the farm in California has truly transformed my cooking. As much as I had learned, I didn't really understand ecosystems. I didn't get it, because, with grocery stores, you can have access to everything. And when you cook from a recipe that's not seasonally focused, it's usually got things from every single different season in it. So, it’s hard to learn how to cook from an ecosystem with the resources that are available to us right now.
But once you start living on land, and you do have so many beets that you're like, What the heck am I gonna do with beets? then you start to get more proficient. Because you're doing it day after day after day. You also start to feel the rhythms of mother nature through your diet, and then you see that Mother Nature is kind of providing you things when you need them. And you start to appreciate that, because you're eating things when they taste the best.
If you've had your citrus season, and it's so delicious in the winter, by the end of that, you're kind of done with it. And you also don't really want it in its off season anymore, because it doesn't taste as good. If I get stuff from the grocery store, that flavor is so much more bland than what we produce—so I'd rather wait. And when you start to have that kind of patience and that rhythm in your diet, you are more closely connected into your land, and it heightens what you're doing in the kitchen.
This book is really an expression of the ten years of cooking from this land, and that's what I hope to introduce: the idea of just getting closer to Mother Nature through the kitchen.
I can remember in the early years, we had so many tomatoes, and when we did sun-dried tomatoes, we learned that if you dip them in apple cider vinegar and then you put them in the olive oil, it's so good. When we come to the time when there’s so many beets, we make beet kvass. As soon as beets come in, I make rounds and rounds of beet kvass for the fridge, because it’s a fermented drink that's really good for your liver.
And then with sunchokes, what ends up happening there is that they give most people a really bad stomachache (because they're filled with inulin, which is a prebiotic, and our bodies aren't quite used to that). We started looking into it, and if you ferment those sunchokes, it neutralizes that. So, we played with them and figured out how to ferment them. And we have a recipe for a fermented sunchoke soup and crispy sunchoke chips. And they were a result of thinking, We grow these so well, and yet, how do you eat them?
The way that I cook at home is to layer the fridge with things that you can pull out, so you can make your meal in like 30 minutes. (That’s not what this book is, but it has elements of it.) For instance, Mirna, who works with me, makes this amazing pork, so I always have the pork in there. And then I'll cook rice in chicken stock, and then I always have sauerkraut made, and I'll always have beet kvass in there. Also, we soak our nuts as soon as we get them in, so all of our nuts are in the freezer have already been soaked, and so they're more digestible. I'll always have hard-boiled eggs. I'll always have vegetables from the farm in the crisper. Cooked chicken will often be in there.
And then I can just come in, and it might just be a simple dish like pork and rice with a scoop of avocado and a scoop of sauerkraut and a hard-boiled egg, and that's it. That's dinner. And we sit down together. It might be a salad—this weekend I made a bunch of cabbage salads for everybody.
This weekend I also made some honey plum jam. I'll make like six jars of honey plum jam, and then we bring in almonds from a biodynamic farm that's a little bit north in California, and I soak and dehydrate a ton of those, and that way I always have almond butter. Then I make homemade sourdough bread. That way, you can have a piece of sourdough bread with some almond butter and homemade jam.
This book is an expression of what would come out of my kitchen, but it's a group effort, because I have a wonderful relationship with our culinary team here. So, it's an amalgamation of what we cook for the program and stuff I do in my kitchen all the time. Some of the things are Kayla's [the head chef’s] creativity and expression. Some of them are from other team members.
There’s the sourdough bread that I make once a week. The nut butter’s in there. The chicken stock—I never don't have chicken stock in my fridge. The fermented mustard and fermented ketchup that are in the book are the ones that are in my kitchen right now. The classic curtido slaw; I always have that in my kitchen. The multi-seed herb crackers—I developed that recipe maybe 15 years ago, and we still always have those crackers around. The fried zucchini recipe is a riff on one that I’ve had since I was a kid. The slow-roasted pasture chicken with lemon-fennel crust; I have some variation on that every week. The bone broth bar is one of my favorite ways to feed a crowd. The carnitas recipe we have at least twice a month. The creamy avocado honey ice cream is the best avocado ice cream. My husband wants that for every birthday.
We also have recipes for different kinds of meats. On the farm, we'll have mutton, because you we have older ewes, and we don't want to waste things. You know, these are the animals that were with you. So, we have a shepherd's pie with sweet potato and this beautiful chimichurri sauce, and you can use mutton in that one. And those kinds of recipes come out of the fact that we have this meat, and we want to be able to enjoy it and eat it—so we come up with more flavorful dishes to work with the flavor of the mutton.
I really worked with my publisher to keep a couple of those recipes in the book. Of course, most of the book is really universal foods that people are able to use—but there's a few sprinkled in there that show what it's like to actually live on a farm and have to figure out those kinds of challenges.
One of the keys with pastured animals is that the meat reacts differently when you cook it. Like, with pastured birds, we have learned over the years that like you really have to treat it like a tough meat. It's like a shoulder cut or something. You have to cook that low and slow. So all of the recipes in the book are for pastured birds, because I wanted people to be able to come to our market—for the local crowd—and be able to get our product and take it home and use it. (There are people raising pastured birds all over the country now.) This is how you cook them successfully. Otherwise, people take them home, and they think, Oh that's terrible. But it's not, because if it’s cooked properly, it's the most flavorful meat you could possibly eat.
Being a vegetarian in the past and then coming back to eating meat—needing to eat meat to restore my health—I realized the only way to do that is to have an acceptance of the cycle of life. And that's something that we don't shy away from, because a piece of what's missing in our culture is that embracing of what the cycle of life is and embracing of the grief cycle that's a part of that. There’s a deepening and an intimacy that comes from that.
I don't want to pretend that I am not proud of being a part of the cycle of life. Even when you grow vegetables, you kill any number of animals—whether it be gophers or snails or bunnies or pollinators. We can't step outside of cycle of life. So, there's no bad diet. Everyone can choose what's best for them. There are spiritual reasons for a vegan diet that are really beautiful. But you know, we also can't pretend that you can avoid death with life.
The whole farm is a team effort, and the culinary expression of the farm is a team effort. In creating the book, I wanted our team to feel like they can see themselves in the pages—whether it be our fertility team, our orchard team, our garden team, or our culinary team. Whether it’s in how we talk about the work they do or the food that's an expression of their hard work. It's a proud collaboration from the whole team.
Shepherd’s Pie with Sweet Potato and Chimichurri Sauce
This savory pie is a comforting and flexible favorite that, when made in advance and frozen, allows us to feed a group in a pinch. The pie and chimichurri sauce can be made separately up to 6 months in advance and thawed in the refrigerator the night before it is baked. Mutton is excellent in this dish, and the chimichurri sauce both brightens and complements the strong flavor of mature meat. If you cannot source it, substitute grass-fed ground lamb or ground beef instead. Orange sweet potatoes provide a gorgeous presentation, but slightly drier white sweet potatoes work as well.
Serves 8 to 10
7 small orange sweet potatoes (about 4 pounds)
4 teaspoons unsalted butter
3½ teaspoons fine sea salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground black peppercorns
2 tablespoons lard [the book offers a recipe for homemade, but store-bought or another fat will work]
2 pounds ground mutton or grass-fed lamb or beef
1 cup minced carrots (about 3 medium carrots)
1 cup minced yellow onion (1 large onion)
1 cup minced celery (about 3 stalks)
2 tablespoons minced garlic (6 cloves)
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves or 1½ teaspoons dried
1 (18.3-ounce) jar crushed tomatoes
1 tablespoon raw apple cider vinegar
1 cup fresh or frozen shelled peas
Chimichurri Sauce (recipe below)
Preheat the oven to 350°F and position a rack in the middle.
Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper and place the sweet potatoes on top. Transfer to the oven and bake for about 45 minutes, or until fork tender. Remove from the oven and set aside until cool enough to handle, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove and discard the skin and place the flesh in the bowl of a food processor. Add the butter, 1½ teaspoons of the salt, and 1 teaspoon of the pepper, and puree until smooth and creamy, scraping down the sides as needed.
Increase the oven temperature to 375°F.
In a 10-inch cast-iron skillet, heat 1 tablespoon of the lard over medium-high heat. Add half the ground mutton, 1 teaspoon of the salt, and ½ teaspoon of the pepper. Cook, stirring with a spoon, until the meat is dark brown and crumbled, 7 to 10 minutes. Transfer to a large baking sheet and repeat with the remaining mutton.
Reduce the heat to medium and add the carrots, onion, celery, garlic, and thyme to the skillet with the residual mutton fat. Sweat the vegetables until the onion becomes translucent, 4 to 5 minutes. Transfer the mutton back to the skillet and add the crushed tomatoes and vinegar.
Increase the heat to medium-high, stir well, and cook for 10 minutes. Stir in the peas and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a 9 × 11-inch casserole dish and spread evenly.
Scoop the pureed sweet potatoes over the top of the filling. Using a spatula, smooth out the top to create an even, attractive layer. Place the casserole in the oven and bake for 30 minutes, or until the filling begins to bubble.
Turn the broiler on medium and broil the pie for an additional 4 to 6 minutes on the middle rack to brown the top, keeping in mind that broiling intensity will vary by oven.
Remove the pie from the oven and let it cool for 15 minutes to set. Serve warm with the chimichurri sauce on the side. Let cool completely and store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to 5 days or in the freezer for up to 6 months.
Chimichurri Sauce
1 cup loosely packed finely minced fresh parsley leaves (1 bunch)
1 tablespoon minced jalapeño pepper (about 1 medium pepper)
1 tablespoon minced garlic (3 cloves)
¼ cup minced red onion (about ¼ large onion)
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
½ teaspoon crushed red chile flakes
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black peppercorns
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
¾ cup cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil
In a small food processor, place the parsley, jalapeño, garlic, onion, salt, chile flakes, pepper, vinegar, and oil. Pulse to combine, transfer to a serving dish, and set aside.
More California Stories to Read, Watch, and Listen To
This past week, the LA Times had a great story about a roving pop-up restaurant focused on reducing food waste, while the Santa Barbara Independent (my hometown newspaper) featured a local chocolate maker who’s goods look like they’d make great holiday gifts. KQED has a beautiful piece by a writer about remembering his late mother through food, and Forum ran a great interview with Tanya Holland about her book California Soul (another of the books in my fall roundup—and one of my favorites this year). And if you happen to pass a newsstand, pick up the current issue of Food & Wine, and you’ll find my own article—written in collaboration with chefs Brandon Jew of Mr. Jiu’s and Evan Bloom of Wise Sons—about why everyone should be eating Chinese food for Christmas (in print only for the moment).
Photos by Ed Anderson, Illustrations by Andy Raville, spreads courtesy of Penguin Random House