A Paupered Year in Review: Our Favorite Pictures

We began this little site round 'bout a year ago.  We had big plans for year in review week, and of course got sidetracked.  Now, it's about a year-and-a-month review, but whatever.  This week we'll be going through a few of the things we've collected over the year.

More than recipes, cooking experience, good advice, writing practice, and interesting friendships, the one thing we seem to have accumulated is a lot of pictures of food.  I'm guessing we have somewhere in the neighborhood of a few thousand.  Those that think that taking pictures of food is a silly business may be right, but it's also an obsessive one.  There isn't always a correlation between how good something tastes and how good it looks.  So the photography aspect of this site is in many ways a completely separate venture from the cooking. This is especially true of soups, stews, and pasta--it's just almost impossible to make a picture of soup remind you of how it can taste.

But as hard as it was sometimes to get that perfect shot, as the Amateur Gourmet rightly pointed out in his classic "How to start a food blog" post, it's almost impossible to be a food blogger without pictures.  So we toiled, and after awhile started getting attached to a few of them.   Here's a collection of a few of our favorites from the year.

From Grilled Cheese for Grown-Ups
Most of the pictures I take are very close-up, because it's the easiest way to make something look elegant and artsy, even if it's kind of a cheap trick.  This photo was the first time this concept revealed itself to me.  How to make thyme leaves seem larger-than-life?  Zoom all the way in.
-Blake

Buffalo Wings with Oven-Roasted Potatoes
This one will always be one of my favorites, mainly because what we had to work with.  Buffalo wings and potato wedges aren't exactly a recipe for picture gold.  And I struggled for nearly 5 minutes trying to just make them look edible.  Then Blake just asked for the camera, put the three bowls together, and took a picture.  It highlighted the different colors of the foods, bowls, and plates, and made the meal look actually palatable, which it only partly was.
- Nick

Roast Chicken: Getting Dirty With The Bird
The opening picture of a post has only simply present the food, but sometimes it actually helps us highlight the theme, too.  This bird was juicy, succulent, and an absolute mess.  For some reason having a person look between the legs of a roasted chicken kind of says it all.  By the way, that's our old roommate Max peaking through. He has a great blog .  Hey Max!
- Nick

Grill Week Day 4: Greek Lamb Kebabs
One night last summer, Nick invited me over to eat some kebabs on the grill.  Earlier in the week we'd spent a whole day cooking a pork shoulder, and used up all the charcoal.  He handed me a beer when I arrived, then hunched over the grill for ten minutes, while his girlfriend and I sat around getting hungry.  I noticed a whole empty book of matches on the ground, and then Nick began kicking things. Apparently, he'd bought the charcoal which required lighter fluid, but refused to admit this fact.  After experiments with newspaper and bits of twig, he finally trudged off to the bodega.  He returned angry, ready to conquer the grill, and proceeded to pour close to half the bottle on the coals.  He told me to turn the camera on, then counted to three.
-Blake

1 Fish 2 Fish: How to Roast a Fish Whole
Sometimes cartoons just simply lie.  When people run really fast their legs don't move around in circles and when you fall off a cliff you don't sink into the ground in a perfect outline of your body.  But if you cook a whole fish, you can pull out a perfect skeleton.
- Nick

One of our early experiments with roasted chicken asked for the bird stuffed with any herbs that were around the apartment.   Generally, we had loads of them hanging around different corners of the refrigerator, because we couldn't seem to ever remember what we had and what we didn't, and they always ended up going bad.  Determined to fix this problem, I took everything green out and chopped it vigorously.  This picture was the result, and it ended up being sort of beautiful.
-Blake

Roxie's Chicken Salad
This is for a post about making chicken salad.  I was showing how to cut the grapes into halves before throwing them in the bowl, which seems like a very simple thing to explain and do.  But for some reason I felt the need to zoom in really close, focus on the middle, and tilt the camera.  Does it help the article?  Not particularly.  Does it keep us sane while taking pictures of food?  Yeah.
- Nick

Baja Fish Tacos
Our attempt at making fish facos was, even now, one of our greatest triumphs.  We did our research.  We made our own tortillas.  We invented the combinations, with help from some other recipes.  And they tasted incredible! One of the only recipes we've repeated more than once, we even made them at a party of food bloggers (though we failed a couple times and made a mess of ourselves, the host's kitchen, and probably the party itself--sorry Celia!).  But anyway, it resulted in a really elegant photograph, too.
-Blake

School Days Tuesday: The Snack Pack
Blake and I did a whole week of school lunch staples, including a long, meandering post about chicken nuggets that took us hours to research and write.  Yet, the most popular entry, by far, was the snack pack, a quick little ditty my girlfriend whipped up in under an hour. It was, as well, the only palatable dish the entire week.  Yet, I had forgotten to take a picture of the finished product.  So we simply opened a store bought one, dipped a spoon in, and caught this gorgeous shot.
- Nick

Any idea what this is?  Look close.  It's corn.  Well, the unshucked ends of some taken in shallow focus in a weird haze of light.  This is just another example of something we included less for its instructional value and more for because we thought it was a beaut.
- Nick

School Days Wednesday: Corn Dogs Made Right
During one of our week-long features on the website, in the midst of recreating classics from the school cafeteria, we began acting like children.  With three or four corn dogs deep frying on the stove, greasy globs of oil all over the kitchen, and the hour approaching midnight, we still hadn't made a decent corn dog.  Desperate, feeling sick, and with an article to write before work the next morning, I asked Nick to hold up the string of sausages for a laugh.  The result?  My favorite picture of Nick this website has ever produced.
-Blake

Mussels a la Portuguese, OR: "Hey Man That's A Lot of Mussels."  "Yeah, That's What She Said."
For the hundreds upon hundreds of photos we have of cooking food, only a select few actually showcase us.  But occasionally we catch each other off guard, like this little gem of Blake cooking some mussels, with wine held high, just so it’d be closer to his lips.  Taking loads of pictures and writing up extensive entries on food could appear to some exactly like work.  But this picture shows the intense pleasure we gain from doing something as ordinary as cooking mussels, while drinking a $15 bottle of wine on some random night of the week.
- Nick

Best of 2006, Best of 2006