‘The Chef’s Garden’: How Rachael Ray Inspired Farmer Lee Jones’ Veggie Obsessed Cooking Show

Farmer Lee Jones is teaming up with Rachael Ray to get to the root of food with The Chef’s Garden. The new 10-episode FYI series comes from Ray’s production company Free Food Studios, and airs as part of A+E Networks’ Home.Made.Nation programming. The show sees jovial farmer Jones welcome an assortment of celebrated names in the culinary industry. They’ll serve up their creativity to a chosen vegetable picked directly from Jones’ 300-acre family farm in Huron, Ohio. 

Names including Emma Bengtsson, Curtis Duffy, Jenner Tomaska and the queen herself, Rachael Ray, join Jones in the industrial kitchen at the Culinary Vegetable Institute to experiment and cook together. The result is a fresh take on these vegetables as they’re used in new and innovative ways.   

Here Jones dishes about his good time on the farm and how Rachael Ray helped and inspired him.  

How did the idea for the show come about? 

Farmer Lee Jones: We’ve been farming for 40 years the second time. We lost the farm in 1983 and started over. We ended up doing a book (“The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables–with Recipes: A Cookbook”) in the middle of COVID. We are friends with Rachael Ray. She loved the idea and layout of the book. I think the idea of the show really came from the book. When you’re trying to show the diversity in a vegetable. We tend to cook butternut squash like mom did. You cut it in half, bake it at 375 with a little brown sugar and butter. We do it twice a year and we’re finished with butternut. Through our farm in Ohio we work with chefs all across the country. They are so creative and imaginative. 

We invited 10 different chefs to come to the farm, pick a vegetable and show the diversity of one single ingredient. It was mind-blowing to see all the different ways they could use a single vegetable. Of course, chefs use a lot of fancy machines and things to do their food. We challenged the chefs to really make this approachable. I’m not a chef. I don’t think our audience are necessarily chefs, but that doesn’t mean we don’t play and have fun and try new things, so we challenge our chefs to make this approachable for people at home. We had a blast. Can you imagine a sweet potato ice cream or a butternut soup or bisque or butternut chips. It blows your mind thinking of all the different ways a vegetable could be used. 

Celeste Sloman/A+E 2024

I think the premiere sets the tone for the show because when I think of beets, I’m kind of turned off. Then Emma comes in and maybe changes that perception.

Our stuff looks good in the fields, but when you get a very talented chef like Emma and the other chefs and use their creativity. Beets are so healthy for you. It’s one of those things that I kind of have to force myself to eat. Seeing some of the ways she prepared them. I’m eating more beets now. We want to get as much color into our diet as possible. Now I’m talking about natural colors. We have to get away from these dyes and food coloring and things like that. We want to eat the rainbow and have a lot of diversity in the diet. That’s important. Emma, I love her. She is so amazing. 

It seemed you got pretty emotional having Curtis on. You were like a proud dad in many ways to see how far he has come. 

I would suggest anyone to look up his personal documentary For Grace. There is a backstory there. I knew him since he was a cook at the Muirfield Golf Club 30 years ago. To see all he has accomplished and the level he has done it. And he had a lot of things stacked against him. It’s a testament to life. We’re going to get knocked down, have bad stuff happen to us and through it all he persevered and kept his eye on his goal. Some of the tragedies he has had in his life would have made any one of us crumble and fall. I’m very proud of Curtis. A native Ohio guy. He is out of Chicago now and really has one of the best restaurants in the country. He has a restaurant called Ever. Then when you’re done you can go to After, which is a cocktail lounge. It is really swanky. I mean wow. It’s amazing, especially for someone from the farm who wears a pair of overalls and white shirt and red bowtie to go into a swanky place like that. It’s off the hook. 

How many bowties and overalls do you own? 

I own 18 pairs of overalls, 18 white shirts, 18  bowties. I do not own another repair of pants. This is what I own. If you were to look in my closet, all you would see is overalls. You know there is an old farm saying that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s earI. You could never put a three-piece suit on me because I could never look nearly as handsome as you. So I might as well go with the old farmer that I am. It really does tie back to The Grapes of Wrath and the story about the farms lost during The Great Depression. It’s an ode to the small family farm. 

We lost our farm when I was 19. Through the benefit and help of chefs around the country. They said to grow for flavor. Grow for the integrity of the product. Grow without chemicals, and we believe there will be enough people that will support you. We were so desperate to thrive in agriculture. When they told us that, we grabbed both of their ankles and said, “Okay, teach us.” For 40 years, they have been mentoring and directing us and guiding us. 

Just incredible the legacy created 

We do the best we can to grow the best flavor without the chemicals. The nutritional level in vegetables has gone down 80 to 100 percent in a 100-year period. We’ve been able to reverse that through regenerative agriculture practices. What that means is instead of using synthetic and chemical inputs to grow the product we are testing the soil and finding out what it is deficient in. Different plants will harvest different energy. Guess what? The nutritional value goes up naturally rather than synthetically. We’re seeing numbers from 150 to 300 times higher than the USDA average. It’s really exciting to see it work. It’s about working in harmony with nature rather than trying to outsmart. It’s exciting stuff. 

Free Food Studios

You mentioned Rachael Ray. How has it been getting to know her? 

Rachael Ray has done so many favors for us. I don’t know if I ever met a human being that has more generosity, more passion, more kindness, more soul, more caring person. She has done a lot to help us during COVID when the restaurants were shut down. A hundred percent of our business was sending our products around the country to chefs using the products. Well, all of sudden, restaurants were closed, and we launched a nationwide home delivery where wherever you order, we could ship from the farm to your door. 

She would call and order boxes and ship them out to people to try and help do something. She has flown us over to Italy and we’ve filmed over there with her. She has been on the farm several times. She doesn’t like to be considered a chef. She considers herself a home cook. She makes things approachable. She has really taught me a lot about growing your own skin. I’m not a chef. I’m a farmer, so when we’re doing this stuff and the chef is talking, it’s like they are way up there and I’m trying to understand. We wanted to bring it down to a lower level so I can understand and the viewers can. I think her approach has been a good lesson and way for me to learn. She knows a lot about food, but she has been fun to work with. It was fun to do our session together. 

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What can you tell us about her episode? 

We found this variety of cabbage in Europe called Arrowhead. It’s cone-shaped and comes up to a point. The reason they grow them in Europe is so they can force a lot of heads in a small space. They can get up to 40,000 heads into one acre, which is amazing. That isn’t the reason we wanted to grow it. The flavor is off the hook. You tend to put pork or steak or chicken on the grill .You can order these, put a little olive oil, a little bit of salt and pepper on the grill, and they are amazing. She used the Arrowhead cabbage. The cabbage had its day in the sun. It was fun to celebrate a specific vegetable and celebrate its diversity. We know it from coleslaw or cooked cabbage. So, it was fun to see what she did with the cabbage. 

What are you excited about viewers to see? 

Look, we’re a family farm in Huron, Ohio. There aren’t supposed to be family farms left anymore. This has been fun for us to have exposure to really great chefs. I would have never imagined you can  roast watermelon…Here we actually roasted it down. You would think you were eating a piece of steak. This show is to show the diversity with the way we can cook things and how to be different than we have ever imagined before. It’s so much fun. 

The Chef’s Garden, Series Premiere, January 27, 10/9c, FYI