A Paupered Year in Review: The Worst

Yesterday we presented you with a list of our favorite food pictures for the year.  But for every perfectly framed culinary moment, we had a hundred average ones which got quickly erased or were forever banished to the external hard drive.  We tried to be good editors.

But occasionally a truly bad picture would emerge, a creation so terrible it took a gall to make.  And even more gall to actually publish it.  Which we have done on a few occasions.

These photos went above and beyond the call of duty to offend.  They weren't necessarily culinary disasters.  Often it was because we did our cooking after 8pm, with no lovely natural light, using desk lamps stretched directly over hot plates of food. But every once in awhile we really failed.  Here are three examples that still make us laugh.

Thai Red Curry
This unparalleled photo lays claim to both the worst photo ever published on the website and the worst meal we've ever created.  It takes some kind of special skill to accomplish that feat.  When it comes to curry, we have no idea what we're doing (clearly: look at the way we haphazardly chopped the vegetables).  Three times we've tried to make the dish, and failed miserably.  This one was the only attempt even close to possible publication.  To give you some kind of reference to how bad this meal was, we have at least a dozen pictures of the food plated.  Yet, this was the only one that looked good.  Needless to say, we've stopped trying to make curry.  But this picture always reminds us of our failure.
-Blake

Everyday Mexican Tacos
Recipe for a bad photo:
1. Cook a meal in someone else's house and take pictures of it. First off, they'll think you're crazy.  But most importantly, the light will be all off.  You'll figure out that most people don't have convenient light sources placed around the cooking area to make taking pictures easier like food bloggers do.
2. Cook more than three different things and attempt to talk about each. In this case, I decided to make three different tacos, each one requiring excessive prep work.  All three of them, by the way, I'd never attempted before.
3. Invite a lot of people over. This will make you rush around to get everything ready, making it nearly impossible to take the serious amount of time needed for that perfect shot.
4. Make a taco where none of the meat is visible because it's hidden under a mound of iceberg lettuce. No matter how great the taco may be, it still looks like a mound of lettuce.
5. And finally, serve it on a paper plate. Really.  What was I thinking?
- Nick

Braised Short Ribs in Barolo
We had just wrapped up the Alternatives to the Shake Shack , a weeklong experience that had brought us an unprecidented number of hits to our meager little site.  So to keep the momentum going we decided to braise some short ribs.  In usual Paupered Chef style we didn't really have any idea what we were doing and ended up with a plate of half cooked ribs next to homogenous looking macaroni. And that was fine.  We don't pretend to know everything, and because we admitted as much on the post, we got a lot of positive encouragement about how to make the dish better next time.  Unfortunately, the reason this dull, earth colored photo will always remain infamous is that it happened to be posted on the day where we got the most hits in the history of the site.  We'd been included Manhattan Users Guide list of the best new New York websites, and our hits had gone from around 100 to around something like 3,000 for a couple days.  And so the curious New Yorkers clicked on the link and came face to face with this.  Tellingly, the hits shrunk quickly.
- Nick

Best of 2006