Author: Ben Starr
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Beurre Blanc (white wine butter sauce)
Beurre blanc is a classic French sauce made with butter, white wine, and shallots. I recently made this sauce at a cooking demonstration to prove how important it is to cook with quality wine, and I promised I’d post the recipe. It’s a very simple sauce to make, and it goes fabulously with fish and…
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Coq au Vin
This is one of my favorite dishes on earth. “Cock in Wine” is the translation…a mean, tough, stringy old rooster slowly braised in red wine. It has become a French classic, but it arose from humble farmhouses, rather than sophisticated bistros. I grew up eating dry, tough old roosters. And any time a rooster attacked…
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Bourbon Fig Jam
You fall into one of two categories of humans. The first: someone who has to pay an outrageous amount of money to purchase figs at the grocery store when they’re in season…sometimes up to a dollar a fig. If you’re not that person, you fall into the other category. Either you or a neighbor has…
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MasterChef 4 recap: Sausage and Mushrooms (S4E15)
(PLEASE NOTE: This blog contains the drunken ravings of a MasterChef season 2 survivor. It should be considered solely opinion, and nothing more.) We’re down to 9 contestants, and Luca rubs a bit of sand in the face of Giuseppe Morisco from Season 2 by stating that he is the only Italian to have ever…
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Today is not only my birthday…
I was born on this day in 1977. July 14 is not only my birthday, it has actual historical significance. In France, this is their biggest national holiday…Bastille Day, or French National Day. It is the day that, in 1789, the French people stormed the fortress Bastille in protest against their monarchy, starting the French…
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What It’s Like To Be On Reality TV
(This blog post has now been picked up on Reddit and other sites, so it’s important for you to know before you read this that this post is made in defense of those on reality TV who are attacked for being villains, racists, etc. On my season of the show, I was treated like a…