With fashion events cancelled worldwide, designer Zac Posen is using his spare time to reconnect with another passion, cooking. Posen cites his family’s Bucks County farm as inspiration, writes Iman Stevenson for The New York Times Style Magazine. 

Posen, designer for buyers from Target customers to Academy Award nominees, has always loved food. He recalls numerous meals in his SoHo boyhood, cooked by his father. 

“My dad,” Posen says, “felt very strongly that a family that ate together stayed together.” 

Cooking was always his “…solace, my happy place,” Posen said. Four years ago, he published some of his go-to recipes in Cooking with Zac. 

During the lockdown, he safely sheltered-in-place with a close pod in Long Island. 

And he cooked. 

“I’ve never cooked more in my life,” he says. He served up fried local blowfish, yellow tomato gazpacho, lobster risotto, barbecue ribs, cherry peach pie and more. 

“Then I went on this angel food cake kick,” Posen confesses. 

Of special meaning were the ingredients he cultivated himself, delighting in the seed-to-harvest culinary opportunity generated by his surroundings.  

“Using my hands to work the soil feeds my soul,” says Posen, tapping the agricultural gene inherited from his father and cultivated in Bucks County. 

“Pulling your first carrot at the end of the season brings real joy. You’re collaborating with nature and science and history.” 

More on Zac Posen’s delicious hobby is in The New York Times Style Magazine.