Author Archives: Ben Sargent

To relax in the evening, my wife watches films and TV series on her France channel – that is, when she’s not watching her German, Italian, or Spanish channels. She’s done this for many years. One particular evening about 10 years ago, she looked up from her laptop, blue light from the screen etching her […]

We meet people on market days that don’t eat lamb because they think lambs are babies. “Baby lambs” are the young animals they are thinking of. Lambs are fully grown sheep and ready for breeding. They are still called lambs at time of harvest because they are not yet bred, if female, or, if male, […]

Sometime in early February, spring fever sets in. The sun-deprived wife pesters me to go out and hunt around between retreating patches of snow to find fresh dragon-green dandelion shoots and – where the ground is sufficiently thawed – roots. By March, these excursions gradually discover the leaves of baby arugula, mustards, garlic, walking onions, […]

Some days I just don’t plan. Then, ravenous, I have to do food, fast. Last night I was lucky. I found ground meat thawing in the fridge. Thinking it was lamb, I rushed outside to pick spearmint. With snow in the forecast, it was already on the pick list in my mind. But then I got back inside and […]

My estimable, round-bottomed wife is a bit of a kitchen witch. She keeps a half dozen large pots busy with all manner of things. Today, she had 4 pots going at once. She was thinking of a sundried tomato-beef stew using Frank’s good beef. But first, there was a pound of dried elderberries, to be simmered down […]

Eat Like Ben On Saturday while I headed to Denver to run a pop-up farm stand at Nurture Wellcare Marketplace, my wife Mary was rendering beef fat into tallow for skin creams. While digging in the freezer for suet, she had found a huge knobby beef bone. Onto the stove it went, to start a broth. By the time I got […]