Hey, I’m Ben.
I grew up in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts in a family where food was everything. My mother’s side is Italian, and like a lot of Italian families, nobody cooked from recipes. Things were made by feel, by memory, by watching someone else do it and absorbing it over time. You learned to cook by standing in the kitchen and paying attention, not by following instructions. That’s still how I cook today.
I went to college on Long Island, ended up back in Rhode Island for a few years after school, and eventually made my way back to Long Island for work. I met my wife there, we built a life together, and Long Island has been home ever since.
My wife is also a great cook, and between her Italian and German heritage and my own New England background, our kitchen has always pulled from a pretty wide range of traditions. Some of the recipes on this site are mine, some are hers, and a lot of them are dishes that existed only in our heads and our hands with no written version anywhere.
That’s actually why this whole thing started.
Why Ben’s Ramblings Exists
When the COVID lockdowns hit in 2020, I found myself at home with time on my hands and a realization that had been nagging at me for a while: none of our family recipes were written down. Not my grandmother’s Sunday gravy, not my wife’s German dishes, not the things I’d been making for years from memory. If something happened to us, those recipes were just gone.
So I started cooking and filming and writing things down, originally just for our son. He was small then and already curious about what was happening in the kitchen, and I wanted him to have a record of the food he grew up eating. The blog and YouTube channel grew out of that. What started as a personal project for our family turned into something I genuinely enjoy sharing with other people.
He’s nine now and still showing up in the videos, which I think is one of the better things about this whole project.
What You’ll Find Here
The site covers three things, which is right there in the name:
Recipes are the core of it. I lean heavily toward outdoor cooking: the grill, the smoker, the Blackstone griddle, the Ooni pizza oven. There’s something about cooking outside over fire that I find genuinely satisfying in a way that standing over a stovetop doesn’t quite replicate. But I cook plenty of indoor food too, and my wife contributes recipes that have nothing to do with anything smoked or grilled. Baking, soups, Italian classics, comfort food. It’s all here.
Reviews cover the gear and products I actually use. I’m not going to tell you something is great if it isn’t, and I’m not going to recommend something I haven’t cooked with myself.
Ramblings are exactly what they sound like: whatever is on my mind. Food related, not food related, doesn’t matter. It’s a blog. Sometimes things need to be said.
A Note on the Recipes
Because so much of what I grew up eating was never written down, a lot of these recipes came from a process of making something from memory, adjusting it, making it again, and eventually landing on something that tastes right. They’re not always traditional. They’re not always precise. But they’re honest, and they work.
If something doesn’t work for you or you have a question, leave a comment. I read them all.
Welcome to Ben’s Ramblings. Pull up a chair.
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