Tag: Ben Starr
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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…
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“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…
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Burning Man 2012: The Pilgrimage
If you’ve been following me since my season of MasterChef aired last summer, you know how fanatical I am about the Burning Man festival. Trying to describe this event is practically impossible. Each summer 60,000 people from all over the world assemble on a dry desert lake bed in northern Nevada and build a city…
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Today: 10 Years
Today my partner and I celebrate 10 years together. 10 wonderful years filled with travel, food, and amazing friends and family. Most people who look back on a decade of a relationship tend to say, “We’ve been through good times and bad times.” But I have a hard time pinpointing any bad times along the…
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Christmas Special is Posted!
My Christmas special which was filmed at the Kenmore Live Studio in Chicago has been posted! It’s 35 minutes long…keep in mind that we had a strict 10 minute time limit for each segment, so the “finished product” is rarely perfect! Enjoy!
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A Homecoming
Some of you know that I’ve just returned from yet another mammoth road trip, this time to the northeast. I was scheduled to speak at a conference at Vanier College in Montreal, and rather than fly, I decided to take a scenic road trip through autumnal New England, take my time, and enjoy the drive. …
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A Post-Masterchef Perspective
I have just spent the past 5 hours reading a fraction of the 949 tweets, 549 emails, and 1752 Facebook messages that have been posted in the 300 minutes since MasterChef finished airing on the East Coast. (Update, as of 11pm August 10, about 24 hours after the show has ended, my email inbox has…
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Birthday Musings
Today I turned 34. Birthdays are usually introspective for me. When I think back on the past year, of course, it is completely dominated by MasterChef…which has taken up almost every bit of time and brainpower since late Fall. While I fully plan on delving into the changes I’ve undergone from MasterChef after the show…
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MasterChef: Celebrities and Cake
Did all that just REALLY happen? Watching it felt like a blur. These were easily the two most intense and personally trying challenges I experienced on MasterChef. I’ll try to condense them into words, but I’m not sure it will work. Team leader. That’s nothing new to me. I’ve been president of this or that…