Kitchen Vignettes

(gentle music) - My name is Jesica Clark I am owner and operator of Willow Vale Farm.

I am also a willow grower and basket weaver.

We grow salad greens and tomatoes for market and I grow most of the food that we eat year 'round.

(gentle piano music) My husband and I, we started this farm about four years ago.

I've always just been fascinated with the idea of growing my own food and I really love plants.

I love watching them grow and I love just thinking about the possibilities of what a seed can become.

So even when I was younger and growing up in the Bronx, and we'd buy those little six-packs of tomatoes and peppers and things like that, and I would shove 'em into wherever I could in our front yard and be so happy with whatever came out.

And then when I went to college, you know, I was studying botany at the time.

The college that I went to had a farm and at some point a friend suggested that I do a work-study there and that was sort of the moment for me where it went from growing a little bit of food here and there for myself to the idea of growing food for my community and to have this feeling where like if I help in growing this food, then people can be fed, that we can have food to share, which was just really important to me.

When people think about a garden, they think lettuces and tomatoes and things like that, but they don't think when they say to themselves I'm gonna eat a meal, they don't think of like all the different components.

So it was really important to me that we have something like chickens so we can have a source of eggs and it was really important to me to have a source of starches.

And I love growing flour corn.

It's like the picture of diversity.

It's the picture of the history of the Americas.

(peeling corn) Corn does bring up a lot of feelings for people, either of love or hate or maybe misinformation.

Because most people think of corn being used in like the industrial complex of like, you know, being fed to cows, animals that aren't really even made to eat corn, and then also all of this corn that's being grown to just turn into high fructose corn syrup.

Then people get like a little bit scared of corn, when in reality, you can grow corn and feed yourself with it, and I don't spray anything on this corn.

And it's honestly like a really important part of my winter diet to me.

That's the purpose of corn, to be nourishing to you as a person and to be not necessarily hard on the earth.

I always like to joke that we look really funny at the grocery store, 'cause when we're at the grocery store we are buying like, you know, we buy like rice, potato chips, like seltzer, and like bacon.

If we didn't go to the grocery store, right, we could live without seltzer and bacon and potato chips.

(laughing) I don't know if I could live without rice, but that's the Philippino in me.

I think, you know, except for some pantry staples, we do try to eat the food that we grow.

(jazzy music) So the meal we're gonna make is sauteed greens and fried egg over polenta.

It's one of the recipes that completely comes from our farm.

So I just love that fact that I can grow this and like make an entire meal that I grew.

And it's so satisfying in the wintertime to like, you know, kind of groggily get the corn off the cob and like do the milling.

And you know, it sort of matches how I'm feeling.

I'm kind of ramping myself up for the day.

Also, I love polenta.

We crack some eggs and make little pockets in the kale and onions and pour that in.

And put the cover on and let that steam through.

So usually by that time, the polenta's done, the eggs and kale are done, shave some Parmesan on it, and eat!

It's like super comforting, just like you wanna just take a spoon and just go like ahh, it's so nice to like have this warm hug of meal.

(jazzy music)