Chef Vivian Howard’s life is filled with sugar, spice, and often everything nice ... though not always.
You can watch her story unfold — with all its fun, stress, long hours, exhaustion, humor, drama, and delicious food — on A Chef’s Life, which airs locally on WGTE-TV, Channel 30.
The show was named a Peabody Award winner in 2014 for “its refreshingly unsensational depiction of life and work in a modern restaurant” — Ms. Howard’s Chef and the Farmer in Kinston, N.C. — “with generous sides of Southern folkways and food lore” stirred in. Growers and producers of prized local foods, efforts to balance work life with family time, and the wisdom of area elders revered for their cooking skills are also ingredients in the mix.
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Although a high-end restaurant was unusual for the rural area it’s located in when it opened 10 years ago, Chef and the Farmer has been a tremendous success. It is a local point of pride, and also a destination.
“Our show has resonated with people from Ohio,” Ms. Howard said when she was in Toledo on Nov. 5 for a presentation at a Key Private Bank dinner held at Inverness Club. And many of them make a trip to the restaurant they feel intimately connected to, having become familiar with Ms. Howard and her personal and professional families.
Raised in eastern North Carolina, Ms. Howard had moved to New York City and graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education before working in the kitchens of some of the city’s best restaurants. She met her husband, Ben Knight, and together they started a catering and soup delivery business based in their Harlem apartment.
Having their own restaurant was a dream which came true when her parents offered to help them, but with one condition: that the restaurant be located where Ms. Howard had grown up.
Although initially averse to returning to North Carolina, going home again has turned out to be a great blessing. “We would not be able to do what we do if we didn’t live next door to my parents,” Ms. Howard says, as she runs Chef and the Farmer and a second restaurant, the Boiler Room Oyster Bar; works on her television show; has produced a cookbook manuscript (delivered to the publisher in mid-October); and raises four-and-a-half year old twins Theo and Flo.
Ms. Howard, a four-time semifinalist for the prestigious James Beard Award as Best Chef Southeast, showcased her very personal style of cooking at the special dinner presentation.
“We really try to highlight public television” at this annual event, said Mark Knierim, central field marketing manager for Key Bank. “It is important,” he said, “to support community-based television and programming,” especially a show like A Chef’s Life, which he enjoys for “the compelling human stories” portrayed.
Ms. Howard and her sous chef John May, as well as Inverness’ executive chef James Castle, executive sous chef Josh Miller, and sous chef Craig Smith, along with the club’s staff, prepared a beautiful six-course meal that featured “classic Vivian things,” as Ms. Howard proudly phrased it, representing true Southern cuisine infused with contemporary flair.
“I like to pay homage to that tradition and elevate it,” she said. “There’s a lot of misconceptions about the food we eat in the South,” which is not all fried, buttered, and slathered in mayonnaise but instead is vegetable and grain-based with meat as “a condiment” rather than a centerpiece.
The dinner menu included dishes such as crab cakes with pickled sweet potato, oysters ceviche, pimped grits with pimiento cheese, jalapeño-studded cornbread crisps, fried green tomatoes coated with benne (a variety of sesame seeds from the Carolinas), and a sweet potato cheesecake.
Chef and the Farmer’s Steak Scarlett, named for Ms. Howard’s mother who “thought we had to have a steak and a baked potato” on the menu to qualify as an exclusive restaurant, was the entree. Collard Stuffed Twice Baked Potatoes accompanied the steak, and featured pot liquor: the liquid left over after the long, slow cooking of greens.
“Pot liquor is my muse,” Ms. Howard said as she demonstrated to the assembled guests how to prepare the potatoes. The prized cooking water infused with flavor “smells like greens and like pork and like home to me,” she said.
“A big part of Southern cooking, and of frugal cooking, is not wasting anything,” Ms. Howard said. And so, not only was the cooking water reserved after preparing the collards, the ham hock used to flavor the liquid was put to good use, too: the meat was stirred into a creamy Hollandaise sauce that accompanyied the beef.
“We can’t, as a planet, continue to waste so much,” Ms. Howard said. Not squandering food resources is now trendy, but it’s “old-fashioned, too ... how it used to be before society became predisposed to disposal.”
In the short half-hour format of A Chef’s Life, Ms. Howard gives an insider’s view of the hard work and long hours necessary to run a restaurant. She also offers cooking tips, such as using corn cobs and husks to flavor broth and “never add[ing] water to something when you could add something that has flavor.” Family members, friends, and neighbors also show viewers how to prepare beloved classic Southern foods — mashed rutabagas, fried okra, butter beans, and muscadine grapes, among them.
Most important, it is critical to Ms. Howard to showcase those who provide us with our food. Her restaurant is called Chef and the Farmer precisely because of the integral relationship between the two professions.
“One of our goals was to show farmers for the intelligent, resourceful people that they are,” Ms. Howard said, recognizing their dedication, effort, struggles, and knowledge. She strives to teach the importance of learning about our ingredients while developing relationships with those who grow and produce them.
Storytelling is revered in the South. And A Chef’s Life is truly a love story to the foods, the people, and the region that formed Ms. Howard.
“Food that has a story is tastier,” she said.
Collard Stuffed Twice Baked Potatoes
This is “a stuffed potato like you’ve never had before,” says Vivian Howard of A Chef’s Life.
2 large russet potatoes, washed
1 teaspoon olive oil
1-1/2 teaspoons salt, divided
1 cup creamed collards (see recipe below)
10 turns of the black pepper mill
2 tablespoons crème fraîche or sour cream
2 teaspoons butter
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1/2 cup pickled collard stems (see recipe below)
Note: 2 large russet potatoes should provide roughly 2 cups of cooked potato flesh. If it is significantly more or less, adjust the other ingredients to reflect the difference.
Preheat your oven to 400F.
Rub the outside of the potatoes with the olive oil and season them with 1 teaspoon salt. Roast the potatoes on a baking sheet on the middle rack of your oven for 1 hour. Let the potatoes cool just till you’re able to handle them. Their flesh will pass much more easily through the ricer if it’s warm.
Split the potatoes in half vertically [not the usual long way end-to-end, but across]. This is optional. You could split them in half through their equator, but you’ll turn more heads if you do it my way. Scoop out all but the 1/4 inch of potato that clings to the skin and pass it through a potato ricer or food mill. If you don’t have one of these you could improvise by mashing the potato with a fork, but do not by any means put that potato flesh in the food processor. You’ll make glue.
Stir together the riced potato flesh, warm creamed collards, the remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt, black pepper and crème fraîche. Mix well.
Stuff the potato skins with the filling and make sure it’s flush with the top of the skin. You’re going to sear the tops of these in a pan, so the filing cannot finish in a mound. At this point you could refrigerate the stuffed potatoes for up to 2 days before searing and heating them through. If you did that however, please bring them to room temperature beforehand or let them spend 5 more minutes in the oven than the recipe recommends.
To serve, preheat your oven to 400F. Melt the butter and oil over medium heat in a 12-inch cast iron pan or skillet. Once the butter is foaming, add the potatoes flesh side down and cook for about 8 minutes. Turn one over and check its color. You want brown and crispy. If you’ve got that, flip the remaining potatoes over and slide the pan into your oven. Cook for 8 minutes more.
Sprinkle the potatoes with pickled collard stems and serve warm.
Yield: 4 servings.
Source: Vivian Howard.
Creamed Collards
2 cups Stewed Collard Greens with Ham Hock (see recipe below)
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup reserved pot liquor from the stewed collard greens
1/4 cup heavy cream
Cream the collards: In a 10 inch skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Whisk in the flour and cook for 1 minute. Pour in the pot liquor and whisk while it comes up to a boil and thickens. Stir in the collards and the cream, and heat through.
Yield: 3 cups.
Source: Vivian Howard.
Stewed Collard Greens with Ham Hock
1 ham hock
4 to 6 ounces pork seasoning meat (salt pork)
7 cups water
1 medium yellow onion, diced
10 turns of the black pepper mill
1/2 teaspoon red chili flakes
2 pounds or 1 whole head collards, large stems removed
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar (optional)
In a 6 to 8 quart Dutch oven or pot, combine the ham hock, pork, water, onion, black pepper, and chili flakes. Cover. Bring it up to a boil and cook covered for 30 minutes. Add the collards. Lower the heat to a heavy simmer. Cover and cook for an hour and a half. Take the lid off and test the greens for doneness. They should have taken on some of the porky goodness from the broth and have a silky soft texture.
Scoop the greens into a bowl leaving the pot liquor behind. Discard the seasoning meat, but pick the smoked morsels from the hock and add it to the greens. Using a collard chopper or a knife, roughly chop the greens and the meat together. You can go as far as you like here, but I prefer a little texture. Stir in up to 1 tablespoon sugar if you deem it necessary. Finally, skim the shine off the top of the pot liquor and stir it in.
Serve the greens warm with hot sauce or hot pepper vinegar, and by all means drink the pot liquor.
Yield: 4 servings.
Source: Vivian Howard.
Pickled Collard Stems
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup granulated sugar
4 garlic cloves
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon red chili flakes
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup collard stems, trimmed of leaves and cut into 1/4-inch rounds
Combine the vinegar, water, sugar, garlic, bay leaves, chili flakes, and salt in a small saucepan. Bring it up to a boil and add the stems. Cook for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and let it cool to room temperature. You can eat these right away, but they’ll be better the next day. The pickles will keep in the fridge for up to a month.
Yield: 1 cup.
Source: Vivian Howard.
First Published November 17, 2015, 5:00 a.m.