The Ranch Journal: August

As summer begins to wind down, calendars often fill before we feel ready. The instinct can be to wait for the perfect time to reset: a clear week, fewer responsibilities, a natural pause. But space rarely arrives that neatly. More often, we have to create it within the lives we already have.

Try taking away before adding: a walk without a podcast, the first and last hour of the day without your phone, meals decided in advance and a block of time with no purpose attached to it. The goal is not to disappear from your life, but to give your attention fewer places to go.

Creating space does not have to be all or nothing. Not every life can accommodate a week away, and meaningful time to yourself is not measured only by its length. Three or four intentional days can be enough to create distance from the usual pace, reconnect with yourself and return with a clearer sense of what you need.

With this in mind, we have extended our three- and four-night retreats at The Ranch Malibu through the end of the year, so making time for yourself does not have to wait for a completely open calendar.

For Chef Gerardo Gonzalez, food has always extended beyond what is served on the plate. It is a way to create conversation, mark the seasons, and bring people into a shared experience.

This month, our Malibu kitchen is quietly packing its bags. As part of an upcoming chef exchange, our culinary team is bringing a piece of the Malibu property, including its garden and pantry, to Hudson Valley. We sat down with Chef Gerardo to talk about what's growing right now, what he's bottling, blending, and steeping behind the scenes, and why late summer is his favorite time to be in the garden.

You describe the garden in three tenses — "Now, Next, and Soon." What's at its peak right now?

I really view the garden and kitchen as a collaboration. Henry, our head gardener, and I meet regularly to talk about what’s thriving now, what’s coming next, and what we can start planning around. Right now, there’s an incredible abundance. We’re pulling little gems and butter lettuce, watercress, kale, zucchini and patty pan squash, string beans and beets. The herbs are especially vibrant: basil, tarragon, mint, lovage, anise hyssop, chamomile and tulsi. Then there are things people might not expect to find growing alongside a wellness kitchen: strawberries, passion fruit, Meyer and Eureka lemons, pomelo and limes. Late summer is really when that relationship between the garden and kitchen comes alive. There’s so much to work with, and the garden is constantly inspiring what we cook.

And what's on the way?

In the next few weeks we'll start seeing husk cherries, our first tomatoes (cherry, slicer, and sauce) potatoes, a second wave of beets. Then a little further out, that beautiful turn toward fall: corn, sweet potatoes, eggplant, collard greens, and the winter squash we love, including, delicata, kabocha, lakota. So a stay now tastes completely different from a stay in six weeks. The menu is never really finished; it just keeps moving with the garden.

Tell us about the exchange. What are you actually bringing to Hudson Valley?

The idea is to bring more than recipes. Alongside the dinners and demos, we're bringing ingredients, products, and stories that come straight off the Malibu property, so guests on the East Coast get a genuine taste of what makes Malibu, Malibu. Part of it is showcasing the menu, and part of it is letting people see the whole ecosystem behind it: the garden, the pantry, the little experiments that don't always make it onto a plate.

Speaking of experiments, we heard you've been infusing vinegars and oils?

That's some of the work I'm most excited about. We have a fig vinegar we infused from last summer's harvest, which tells you how far ahead you have to think in this kind of cooking. We're also playing with shiso and pink celery vinegars, and oils infused with what's growing on the property like lovage, watercress, basil, fig leaf. There are house-dried herbal teas, too. These are the kinds of things that capture a season and hold onto it, so you can taste July in the middle of winter.

There's a signature salt in the works as well.

Yes, I've been working alongside Henry on a finishing salt that's really becoming a signature of ours. It's a blend of eureka lemon peel, marigold, white sage and tulsi. It's the sort of small, considered detail that changes a dish, and honestly it's the kind of thing I hope guests will one day be able to take a little piece of home with them.

We hear there's a kombucha collaboration brewing, too.

We're exploring one, yes. There's a wonderful chef-driven kombucha maker out of Los Angeles that works with farms and gardens to build drinks out of seasonal surplus, the beautiful overgrowth that would otherwise go to waste. We're looking at a kombucha built around citrus and other things from our garden. Nothing I want to over-promise yet, but it's the kind of collaboration that fits exactly how we think about the land here.

How does your work and learnings in the kitchen spill over into the spa side of the property?

It does, and that's always been part of how I work. The same garden that feeds the kitchen can feed the body in other ways. I've developed botanical sugar scrubs in the past, made with lavender, passionflower, coconut oil, sweet apricot oil, and whatever seasonal botanicals the garden is offering. To me it's all one continuous idea: the property takes care of you, start to finish.

Sometimes a life that looks full still feels like something is missing. Arthur C. Brooks explores where a true sense of purpose comes from and why it can be so hard to find. This book is a thoughtful look at the relationships, beliefs and callings that give our lives depth.