Ben Starr – The Ultimate Food Geek

Category: DIY

  • How to Make Aged Cheese: “Black and Bleu” Ricotta Salata

    I’ve been making cheese at home for about 3 years now, and SO many fans have begged me for instructions on how to make cheese after I’ve posted photos of exquisite homemade cheeses. Cheesemaking is a specific hobby with it’s own set of necessary equipment and supplies.  It’s sort of like wine making or beer…

  • How to build a spot-watering system for berries, bushes, and trees

    So you’ve planted some blackberries or raspberries or blueberries, and you spent your first year trying to remember to water them deeply once a week.  Occasionally you’d leave the water on all night by accident.  Occasionally you’d forget to water on that one week when it was blisteringly hot, and your berries nearly died.  And…

  • 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…

  • 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…