Ben Starr

The Ultimate Food Geek

Category: Recipes

  • Candied Ginger

    Every tried to buy candied or crystallized ginger in the spice rack at the grocery store?  It is ridiculously overpriced…a single small bottle can cost upwards of $10, which is silly because you can make your own for about $10 a POUND. To get started, you’ll need: 1 pound of fresh ginger root To make…

  • Pumpkin Gingerbread Cookies

    Pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin.  It’s not just for pie.  These delicious cookies are rather decadent…chewy, moist, and exploding with pungent ginger flavor.  I recently baked hundreds of these with Michael Chen from MasterChef Season 3 for a third grade class at a local middle school during an assembly about seasonal cooking.  You might think kids would…

  • “Pumpkin”nickel Bread

    You all know how obsessed I am with pumpkin.  This recipe was birthed years ago for one of my legendary Fall Dinner Parties where I wanted to marry the dark autumn flavors of pumpernickel bread with my favorite ingredient: pumpkin.  The first incarnation was not a success, I have to say.  Recently, for our all-pumpkin…

  • Mind-Boggling Life-Altering Earth-Shattering Mac and Cheese

    It’s everyone’s favorite food.  And I confess, I even get excited about eating a fake-orange bowl of the artificial stuff from the box or at a restaurant.  Who doesn’t like macaroni and cheese? The problem is that we get accustomed to this impossibly-creamy texture that we get served at chain restaurants, which contain processed cheese…

  • Homemade Sriracha (fermented red pepper sauce)

    If you have a garden, like me, and have more than a couple of pepper plants, chances are in the early fall you’re INUNDATED with so many chiles that you can’t give them away fast enough.  What on EARTH do you do when you’ve got pounds of hot peppers? If you’re me, you preserve them…

  • 1-Hour No-Knead Yeast Dinner Rolls

    Bread.  It can be a problem with dinner, because sometimes you just don’t have 4-5 hours to prep contemporary yeast bread or roll recipes.  You all know that I prefer to use long, slow fermentations with my yeast breads to produce incredible flavor and crust.  But that requires me to start the bread the day…

  • Guava and Cream Cheese-Stuffed Pumpkin Muffins

    It finally got cool in Dallas, and even though it’s still mid September, pumpkin season is calling me.  One of my local markets finally started stocking sugar pumpkins (I didn’t get any planted in time in my garden this year), so I stocked up yesterday and made some puree.  And since I have a friend…

  • Strawberry Shortcake

    This is that quintessential American summertime dessert, and when strawberries are in season and my garden is overflowing with them, we have shortcake several times a week.  It’s such an easy dessert to make…I can turn out a shortcake with 5 minutes of effort and 20 minutes in the oven. Strawberries are really the feature…

  • Pumpkin Caramel Tiramisu

    Tiramisu is Italian for “Hey you, pick me up!”  Traditionally it’s a layered dessert of tiny cakes called ladyfingers soaked in espresso, and mascarpone (an Italian cream cheese pronounced “MOSS-car-PONE-eh” and NO OTHER WAY).  You know me, and I find a way to put pumpkin in everything, so this is my VERY special version of…

  • Transforming Thanksgiving Leftovers

    So it’s the day after Thanksgiving and your fridge is exploding with a mangled turkey carcass, half a pan of stuffing, gobs of gelatinous cranberry sauce…and you’ve got no idea what to do, right? Don’t microwave another paper plate filled with stale leftovers.  Transform the leftovers into something different and better!  Turkey Meat Tamales Coming…