Ben Starr

The Ultimate Food Geek

Author: Ben Starr

  • MasterChef: Pizza for 350!

    Our first group challenge!  And suddenly I’m back in middle school gym class and the captains are picking their team.  Christian and Suzy are the first to be picked.  No surprise there.  They seem to have emerged first as the two contestants with the most knowledge and experience.  I’m fresh off a day where I…

  • MasterChef: Hats!

    Some of you have been commenting about the hats and wondering what the story is with them.  Before I left for MasterChef, my Mom made me a bunch of hat/apron combos to take with me to the filming.  (She’s a very accomplished seamstress.)  After a couple of days wearing the different hats, Gordon got frustrated…

  • MasterChef: Week 3

    “And the worst dish today belongs to…Ben Starr.” WHAT??? The WORST dish of the day? Well, I guess someone has to be the worst… Wait a minute…backtrack. 18 of us. From 100 finalists. From 30,000 who auditioned. That feels cool. And we enter the MasterChef kitchen for the first time, each of us thinking we’re…

  • MasterChef: Week 2

    Wow… I’m just speechless. Reliving the MasterChef experience by watching it on TV is almost as stressful as womans health info when I was actually competing. Making my signature dish is both fun and nerve-wracking.  There’s a strict time limit of 1 hour.  Not a second longer.  Luckily, my partner Christian, my neighbor Sharon, and…

  • MasterChef: Week 1

    I wake at 5am for my flight to Los Angeles to start my MasterChef journey!  I can barely open the front door to my house, though.  It faces north, and all night we’ve had ice falling from the sky.  My car is completely encased in an inch of ice…I can’t even get the key into…

  • Outdoor Fireplace and Pizza Oven!

    This is the biggie. The construction of an outdoor fireplace and wood-burning pizza/bread oven. HUGE project…14 feet long, 11 feet high at the top of the chimney. I don’t know what I was thinking. You may have noticed the absence of a date from the title of this post.  This is because it was begun…

  • Curbs for Gravel Substrate Retention, June 2009

    The sub-base for the flagstone is going to be 6″ of compacted “flex-base.” Flex-base is recycled pavement from roads that have been torn up or resurfaced, so it’s a very green product, considering you’re saving it from going into a landfill. More on flex-base later when it actually arrives, but before it does, we need…

  • Retaing walls! May 2009

    There was already a wooden retaining wall descending into the garden, but I knew that if I was laying stone over the backyard, the wooden retaining wall would decompose LONG before the stone did, and I’d have an expensive nightmare on my hands. It made sense to remove the wooden retaining wall and replace it…

  • Backyard Renovation, April 2009

    Knowing I’d have to rent a “Bobcat” (a small bulldozer) to grade, or flatten, the backyard, kept me from really starting the renovation. The flagstone sat behind the house, weeds growing around it, bunnies and snakes taking up residence…until some new neighbors moved in several doors down! Tony and Lindsey, a young couple who completely…

  • Backyard Renovation, March 2009

    The renovation was something of a distant pipe dream until I spotted an ad on Craigslist for flagstone. “We just moved to a new home in Colleyville and our back yard is all covered in flagstone. We have two kids and two dogs, and we really need grass out there. My husband has stacked up…