Chef Vivian Howard and her husband Ben leave New York to open a restaurant in her small North Carolina hometown. Vivian revisits the Southern tradition of “putting up” corn and shares her method for making smoked corn relish. As the episode concludes, a devastating setback threatens their new life.

Vivian and Ben rebuild their restaurant against the backdrop of the Southern harbinger of spring, the strawberry. Their twins go on their first strawberry-picking excursion, and Vivian and a friend develop a recipe for coconut cornbread strawberry shortcake with basil whipped cream.

The restaurant gears up for a practice service when the new equipment and new menu will be tested in real time - but nothing is going as planned. One of the big changes to the restaurant's menus is the addition of a section called "Pimp My Grits," where Vivian exalts the lowly, quintessentially Southern ingredient in four distinct ways.

Vivian goes about christening the restaurant's new "whole animal, no waste" program with two little pigs from Warren Brothers' farm. She uses everything - including the skin - and, on her father's recommendation, demonstrates how to make sweet potatoes with cracklins.

Vivian preps for a Southern Foodways Alliance luncheon. Food enthusiasts from around the country are coming to study BBQ & Vivian plans to serve them the ultimate tomato sandwich. She weighs the risk of serving something so simple to this discerning crowd, but in her gut she believes it will be the highlight of their trip.

Vivian goes to Cedar Island to explore the new culture of farm-raised oysters in the Southeast. She and Ben share plans of opening an oyster bar across the street from Chef & the Farmer in hopes it will be a place that adds character and variety to the tiny town's "dining scene." Vivian and her dad orchestrate their family's first-ever oyster roast and are blown away by how much everyone enjoys it.

Ben, Vivian and the twins pick muscadine grapes at a small local vineyard while learning the history of this native grape. Vivian visits Mike and Gator, her grape suppliers, and makes homemade wine. Back at the restaurant, Vivian makes a pizza with mulled muscadines, and Ben tests this new creation during their first stressful pizza night in the wine shop.

Vivian travels to Columbia, South Carolina, to meet with Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills and learns about Carolina heirloom rice growing in fields on the Savannah River. Glenn explains Anson Mills' efforts to save heirloom grains and discusses the importance of ingredient biodiversity. Glenn's passion inspires Vivian to host a "rice dinner" at Chef & the Farmer, where each course centers around this grain. Scarlett, Vivian's mom, schools her daughter on how to make the chicken and rice she grew up eating.

Vivian visits neighbor Marty Harper's peanut farm just before and during harvest. Vivian's dad introduces Ben and Vivian to the old school break snack, a pack of salted peanuts dumped into a Pepsi in a glass bottle. At the restaurant, Vivian translates the snack into Pepsi glazed pork belly with country ham braised peanuts. Vivian reinvents the popular Southern snack, boiled peanuts, for the local farmers' market.

Vivian introduces us to Rob and Amy Hill, proprietors of one of the largest sweet potato farms in the country and two of the restaurant’s best customers. Vivian and her mom, Scarlett, make her grandmother’s candied yams and Vivian later re-imagines these for the restaurant with texture, sorghum and pecans.

Vivian spends the morning with her neighbors, the Mills brothers, participating in their 100-year-old, all-male family tradition of making collard kraut. Vivian visits Warren at Brother’s farm to talk about the Eastern Carolina ingredient with a cult following, the Cabbage Collard.

Vivian and Ben go to Maple View Dairy to pick up product for the restaurant. They talk buttermilk with the dairy’s manager, and the noise Ben makes while savoring his cup of the thick liquid annoys his wife.

Vivian visits Broad Slab Distillery, where they talk about the art and soul of white lightning. The restaurant’s mixologist works moonshine into several new drinks, while the restaurant staff struggles through the holiday party season. They end the season with a party of their own at Ben and Vivian’s new house, with AppleJack Moonshine cocktails making a guest appearance.

After a year recovering from a restaurant fire and re-opening Chef and the Farmer, Vivian and Ben go all-in to open a burger/oyster bar called The Boiler Room. Vivian boils over with the stress of staffing adjustments, testing new menu concepts, and the enormous task of putting 500 pounds of blueberries to good use.

Vivian and Ben head to the beach for their annual summer vacation with the Howard family. Vivian turns up the heat with a bit of friendly competition with her older sisters. Frogmore Stew, cooked outside at the beach of course. She visits a fish camp and learns the heads and tails of fresh shrimp. Back in Kinston, the devil is in the details as Vivian and Ben prepare to open a second restaurant.

Burgers. Oysters. Beer. Hallelujah! Vivian and Ben are on the cusp of opening their new restaurant, the Boiler Room, and they are facing a new challenge: how to make a veggie burger stand out. Vivian waxes romantic about the beloved butter bean and chooses it as the star of her new burger, but quickly learns that the butter bean is a straight up diva when it comes to growing conditions.

Vivian, Ben and the entire Chef and the Farmer staff hustle to complete the mammoth preparations necessary for her big luncheon at the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. Vivian take the women in her life as inspiration for her menu, honoring those who have made her the woman she has become.

Excitement turns into heightened emotion and real nerves for Vivian as she faces one challenge after another in the prep kitchen before her big SFA luncheon. Vivian is glad to have Chef Jason Vincent to lend some street cred. Rice almost brings Vivian to her breaking point but everyone pulls together for the big event and her parents join her on stage for an emotional and watershed moment for her.

As Vivian returns from her Mississippi road trip to the fall harvest, she confronts her long absence from the dinner service at Chef and the Farmer. She travels to an heirloom apple tree collector, Creighton Leigh, the Johnny Appleseed of the Southern apple, who grows 800 varieties in the rolling hills of North Carolina’s Piedmont. Savory and sweet heirloom apples are in grits with cheddar and ham.

Vivian presents a few of the many ways fish makes its appearance in Southern cooking, from dried mullet roe to a friendly fish stew competition with Warren Brothers’ buddies. Vivian gets schooled on the rules of a good Eastern NC fish stew: Make it a social event. Use whole hog bacon. Resist your urge to stir! And most importantly, start crackin’ eggs and don’t forget a side of white bread.

It’s November ya’ll and that means it’s busy at Chef and the Farmer. Vivian is feeling the stress of both work and home as she juggles running the restaurant after suspending her sous chef and preparing for her own Thanksgiving feast. She and Ms. Scarlett head to Ms. Scarlett’s family farm where they source their pecans and have a run in with Uncle Dwight’s wild boar.

The heady heyday of hot Summer vegetables are over and rainy winters can bring some dull varieties. Few are more unglamorous than the turnip. Nevertheless, Vivian is determined to showcase the sexiness of this seemingly vanilla root vegetable. Unlike the bitter, earthy purple-top variety, Warren and Lilly show Vivian how to cook the tender, silky Hakurei turnip.

Late winter brings “run-up” turnip greens, which Vivian sees as central to her approach to southern food, capturing both the spirit and the letter of what Chef and the Farmer is all about. Miss Scarlett helps out by procuring greens from a local produce stand, washing them four times, and discussing the how-to of buying and cooking good turnips to satisfy her "southern people."

As Vivian waits for Spring’s vegetables to appear, she pauses to appreciate chicken’s endless capacity as an ingredient. The restaurant’s new best-seller is a whole chicken, pounded and stuffed with broccoli salad, a method that takes a free-range bird much further than it can ordinarily go. Meanwhile, her effort to deconstruct chicken salad, a Southern favorite, turns out better in theory.

Vivian hunts for ramps—an Appalachian wild leek—with renowned bacon purveyor Alan Benton near his home in the Tennessee countryside. The restaurant world goes wild over ramps, after a winter of few fresh vegetables. Vivian’s “ramp dealer” brings her his freshest stash, foraged from the North Carolina mountains. Theo and Flo show off a piglet and a baby goat at the ag show.