Kitchen Vignettes

(birds chirping) (soft music) - 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 in 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 Grandpee 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, it was far more than having a you know, fine car or clothes or something.

I think that left a very big impression on me and it 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 flood of food.

And so being able to somehow harness that and put that on my own plate, this is pretty quite self centered, the whole thing.

(Cameraman laughs) A lot of the things we eat here, Donald Trump can't afford to eat, Bill Gates can't afford to eat.

They're not in a 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, um, the sky's the limit.

(soft orchestral music) One of my favorite shell bean varieties is a multipurpose pole bean from Oaxaca, Mexico, called Jimenez.

It's one of my favorites because it's a multipurpose 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 made of shell beans, sweet corn, and I usually also add red peppers and summer squashes or zucchini to it.

The peppers takes just a few minutes to filet them, clean the seeds out, which I save by the way 'cause this is a variety I bred myself, to save myself on seeds I can ferment.

Too dry.

Then get the shell beans shelled, and then some water and boilin' 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, little bit of oil and continue cooking them a little bit longer.

And then it's done.

(soft classical music)