Ben Starr – The Ultimate Food Geek

Author: Ben Starr

  • 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…