I was looking for a way to jeuge up my blog for the new year. I’ve been blogging since 2006, on two platforms, blogger and Word Press. My brother decided to stop blogging at a similar juncture, but in fact, he’s back. I started looking at other food blogs that I like, particularly Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks and Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen. Heidi recently posted some advice on how to maintain a long term blog, the key piece of which – to me at least – is to try to write something good once a week. Smitten’s Deb does more like twice a week, but what both writers do is feature a recipe with every post.
I thought, ah ha, I can do that. I installed a new word press, and set up Deb’s Lunch … at the counter. The metaphor being that you come to Deb’s Lunch, and sit down at the counter, and something tasty is served up. I thought, ok, each week I will keep track, and then write about – and photograph – a dish that I’ve either cooked or eaten, and include the recipe, and my recipe experiments. Which is a great aim, but unfortunately, the difference between me and Heidi and Deb P. is that I have a day job, and food photography just sucks under kitchen lights at night. Heidi has a kitchen where she does most of her photos, with white marble counter tops, and corner windows where she can arrange food in great light. She’s got a studio for her mail order shop Quitokeeto, that also seems to have great light. Deb is the master of the process photo, series of images showing the process of the dish from ingredients to completion. Even when I’m home cooking in daylight, I get too caught up – I’m afraid I’ll ruin the food by stopping to photograph it. And sometimes I just forget – I eat up, or serve up, whatever it is before I shoot it.
For example, this week, I’ve been eating oatmeal for work breakfasts, and roasted beets and egg, and rice pudding. I thought maybe I’d write about the roasted vegetable salad I had on Tuesday for lunch at work, but it was too mushy and jumbled. I had an almost life-changing realization, that instead of boiling over oatmeal in the work microwave, and eating underdone oats, I could cook the oatmeal at home, and then take it to work in a nice glass microwaveable container. I’ve been cooking the oats with dates, and enjoying them with a blob of local Greek yogurt, and one day, some jam, but didn’t capture any part of that process. The yogurt has a cream top that is just yummy with the oatmeal & dates. My creamy rice pudding recipe is a compilation of a couple, and deserves to be written up, and I even packed a dish of it, and some beets and egg, for my drive to Chicago yesterday. But by the time I got here, it was too dark and late for a good picture, and I figured I might as well eat. So all I’ve got is empties.
Oh, well, I’ll keep trying.
Empty containers & cups that once held beets and egg, rice pudding, and coffee
