Me and My IPhone Camera

Food photographer extraordinaire? No, I'm just a girl with an IPhone.

And there I am to the left trying to capture the best angle of the polenta cake I posted last weekend.

As you can see, my kitchen is simple with few mod-cons. Sometimes I surprise myself with the meals I produce with minimal gadgetry, especially given the cook-and kitchen-ware available now.

When I did my professional training we had our own knife set (which I still have), a uniform including ridiculous hat, and minimal equipment in the school's kitchen. The philosophy: It's not the equipment that makes a great meal, it's the chef!

Maybe you've read The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. My culinary education wasn't that brutal, but I do remember having some mini-meltdowns after humiliating reprimands from one of the tougher chefs I studied under.

I think the boot-camp style of teaching was intended to toughen us up so that once out in the world of fast-paced commercial kitchens, sweating under stress and pressure, we didn't crack. I didn't crack, so I guess boot-camp worked.

My next post will be a picture and method for making flourless, Orange and Almond cake, which I'll be consuming this evening at my birthday dinner! I sent the recipe to a friend, as she kindly offered to make my birthday cake. It's one of my favorite desserts; I hope you'll love it too.

Coming up on Market to Mouth, I'll write another shopping list, a modified version of the list a friend uses for her family. Using items from that list, I'll post accompanying meal ideas for a family of four.

Then at some point next week, I'll accompany that friend to Whole Foods while she grocery shops, offering her tips on the spot to help her reduce her weekly expenditure on groceries. In subsequent posts, I'll share those tips, and more.

Enjoy your weekend!

Flounder with Polenta & Chard

When I upload photos I've taken of meals I've made for this blog, I'm often woefully disappointed with the way the pictures look.

Disappointed, because I know how absolutely gorgeous food can look when it's staged for the camera.

In my professional cooking days in Australia, I had a friend who worked in the kitchens of Kraft.

Kerry called me one week and asked if I'd be interested in helping her stage food for a photo shoot for Kraft's latest cook book.

I jumped at the opportunity. And what an eye-opening experience it was!

I discovered that because cooked food looks kinda limp, tired, and unappetizing, great food photography takes advantage of partially-cooked or raw food (particularly if vegetables are in the shoot) even if it means the final photograph is a big fib.

The truth is, oftentimes a picture of a dish that is supposedly cooked (like a veggie-rich casserole) is not a photo of cooked vegetables at all, but a manipulated image of par-cooked vegetables.

After all, who would be enticed to read or buy a cook book featuring limp and tired-looking food?

So, in defense of my amateurish food pics, I'm just a girl with an iPhone, a laptop (not a Mac), on a mission to show you real food in all its cooked, and sometimes limp-looking glory.

So with that in mind, let me tell you about the above meal:

Flounder with Polenta and Chard

(Ingredients are from the March 19th shopping list)

1) Add about a cup of polenta to a pot of (3-4 cups) of boiling water. Stir with a wooden spoon, letting the polenta simmer for about 30 mins or until it turns porridge-like. Turn polenta out onto a plate and let it cool and set.

2) Meanwhile, remove woody stalks from chard and chop it into pieces.

3) Saute some chopped onion and garlic in olive oil, toss in chard & a cup of frozen peas, turn heat to low so that veggies stew slowly in their own juice.

4) Cut polenta into chunks and toss it in with veggies.

5) Lay flounder fillets over the top of polenta and veggies, season with salt and pepper and put lid on. Flounder will steam cook in about 5 minutes.

To Serve: Spoon a portion of vegetables and polenta onto plates, top with a piece of steamed flounder, squeeze half a lemon over the lot and serve with chopped cilantro.