This story is part of On Repeat, a recurring feature in which we ask top chefs, cookbook authors, and other famous foodies about the dishes they just can’t quit.
For the last 40 years, Lee Jones, alongside his brother Bob Jr., has been shipping curated boxes of fresh, seasonal produce from his family farm in Huron, Ohio, to chefs around the world—and more recently, to regular folk around the country, too. His new FYI channel series, The Chef’s Garden, kicks off next Monday and invites chefs to stop by the farm, cook gorgeous veggie dishes, and talk about how Jones (who goes by Farmer Lee) cares for his land.
With inspiration coming from so many places, we were plenty curious what dish Farmer Lee would say he keeps coming back to On Repeat, but he didn’t hesitate: He pointed to spiced roasted carrots, which first appeared in The Chef’s Garden cookbook he wrote with a bunch of the pros who buy his produce. “It’s singularly the most popular dish in 100 recipes in the book,” he says. The sauce involves some light sour cream, which you can swap out for a nondairy version like Violife—or even tahini.
Why I love it
“It’s just a magical dish. People make the assumption that a carrot is a carrot is a carrot. And that’s not true! The way they’re grown, and the varieties, and how they’re cooked, they all enter into this. It’s so fun, because you can get different textures by cooking carrots at different levels. This has a texture almost like meat. I mean, you think ‘roast beef’ with this dish. And the beauty is that the carrot absorbs and takes on those flavors of the seasonings.”
What I’ve changed
“What these chefs do—and what the show allows us to do—is show the creativity that can happen. You don’t have to follow a specific recipe. Make the recipe yours. Use different colors of carrots. You like a particular seasoning? Use it! It isn’t about perfection; it’s about what you love. Have fun and be creative and maybe you’ll come up with a whole new dish!”
What else I’m into right now
Seasonality. Mother Nature provides such a natural rhythm to what we should eat. Of course this time of year it’s the rutabaga, it’s the potatoes, it’s the celery root, it’s the carrots, it’s the beets. We can get raspberries and strawberries 12 months a year. Yeah, we can do it, but I don’t know from an environmental standpoint or a financial standpoint or a health or a holistic standpoint that really makes sense. Sure, sometimes we want a strawberry—I’m not condemning that—but I think that there’s a nice natural rhythm.
Going off the grid. We’re putting in right now a system that will take us 70% of the way there. It’s a combination of things that includes solar, wind, AI. We have to think about the environment, it’s part of farming today.