Peter Barrett

In this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, I head to the Hudson Valley to hang out with food writer, photographer, gardener, forager, and fermenter Peter Barrett. He shares his Five Rules for Nurturing a Real Cooking Practice. We talk about why growing even one herb on a windowsill can change the way you think about food, why practice matters more than perfection, how to stop hiding behind cookbooks, and why taking a food Sabbath can make the rest of your week easier. It’s a conversation about cooking with intention, but also about building a life that feels more connected, more grounded, and a little less performative.The best cooking habits are the ones that fit your actual life, not the fantasy version of it. Not everyone is going to mill flour, tend a massive garden, or spend Sunday making twelve jars of pickles, and that’s fine. Sometimes the win is roasting one chicken, growing basil in a pot, or learning three meals you can make without thinking. The point is not to turn your kitchen into a stage set for Instagram, it’s to create a rhythm that supports you. Cooking should lower the temperature of your life, not raise it. It should make your week easier, your table fuller, and your relationship to food more personal. The goal is not perfection. It’s finding a way of feeding yourself that feels sustainable, satisfying, and yours.Five Rules for the Good Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.IntroductionHello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.Today, I head up to the Hudson Valley to sit down with food writer, photographer, gardener, forager, and fermenter, Peter Barrett, who’s here to share his 5 Rules for Nurturing a Real Cooking Practice.He talks about how growing just one thing can change your perspective on life, that there is no excuse for giving up on yourself in the kitchen without loads of practice, and that being gentle on yourself when it comes to cooking is a real recipe for success.This is a great interview for anyone who’s looking to get started in the kitchen or for anyone who’s hit a lull and looking to find some new inspiration.So let’s get into the rules.Peter’s JourneyPeter, so good to see you.I can’t believe it’s already been a few months. Thanks for making time for the show.That’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.You’ve spent decades growing and foraging and preserving, cooking as much of your own food as possible. What drives you to do this?I was in the artwork. I moved up to the Hudson Valley from Brooklyn 20 years ago now. I put in a garden. It was one of the first things I did.My grandfather had taught me to make pickles when I was a little kid because he was from Poland. And when he grew up, that was a survival strategy. That had nothing to do with hipsters or yuppies or anything. It was staying alive through a long, hard winter.I just got more and more into the growing and the cooking and the fermenting. And I started to learn about mushrooms and other wild edible things.I started writing a blog just as a sort of journal to keep track of my kitchen exploits. And then over the course of the ensuing years, I just did more and more of that.I got one magazine gig, then another magazine gig. I’m working on a book with Dominique Crenn right now. We’re supposed to go to France next month.So it just sort of morphed. As the art tapered off, the food thing sort of rose to meet it.Cooking Across CountriesYou’ve cooked a lot in America, in the Hudson Valley, and you’ve been able to travel to Italy and go into France with Dominique Crenn.Country to country, do you find a difference in this type of approach of growing and preserving and really understanding the food that you eat?It’s simplistic, but I think places that have winter have different fermentation cultures than places that don’t.You can’t f**k around with the absence of food when the ground is frozen, of course.If you think about Korea and Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, the pickle game is strong, and the pickle game is strong because they had to.There’s what they call sottoglio in Italian, which is where they preserve things under oil, or sottaccetto, which is in jars of vinegar.You wander around in most parts of Italy, south of Alto Adige, and everyone has a garden that’s more or less year-round.It’s a different approach to preservation. It’s less mandatory and baked into the cuisine, if that makes any sense.Why Sharing MattersOne of the things I’ve loved about your writing and your storytelling is that you really want to share this knowledge with people across the world and