Wednesday Work: Lunch!

It's about that time around here - time for lunch! Almost (but not) more than eating my lunch - I love preparing my lunch, styling my lunch; and looking at pictures of lunch once the eating is done.

You can see my measly offering up above (we're talking some serious constraints here in accessibility and styling - the carrots would not agree to be shot head on: I'll have to check their contract).

But alas, there is puh-lenty of B E A U tiful pictures of lunch out there in web land for you to look at.

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I saw this cake as an angry face, until just now. I was attracted by the humor ... that apparently isn't there. But anyway,

Design Sponge has a lot of great recipes and A LOT of wonderful food photography.

You can find images like this below, outlining the ingredients of a dish,

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Or you can head over to Grass Doe 's Johnathan Levitt, who takes a viewpoint more so on the side of commercial restaurant photography.

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My favorite food photography is one that sets up a scene, a scene with a story. Then not only can I daydream about the food I would be eating, but imagine who it is I might be sitting across from and what we might be discussing.

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Some kind of "When Harry Met Sally" road trip rendezvous or an afternoon at home building a print shop in the basement,

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Or my favorite - - traveling with my lover through Iceland's cold countryside, boots crunching the snow, perspiration freezing us to our scarves, on our way to the next, then the next town for a bed and breakfast and a cross-country ski trail, stopping for a hearty bowl and a delicious brew,

Check out 101 Cookbooks for more images like the one pictured below.

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All this talk of food! With Thanksgiving right around the corner! What will your holiday table look like?

TO-DO: 10 things to-do before you make your way HOME for the holidays

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1. Listen to records, LOUD...

2. while staying up much too late...

3. drinking PBC beer or liquor drink of your choice...

4. gluing found objects ...

5. to precisely cut out paper shapes...

6. getting glitter all over the rug...

7. make dinner at midnight...

8. eat ice cream at 2am...

9. and watch Hellboy II on Netflix Instant...

10. go to bed naked. ***

***(but don't forget to set the alarm!!! tomorrow's still a work day!)

(11. remember who you are.)

Reminder: Abelardo Morrell at the PPAC, TONIGHT!

Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Visiting Artist Lecture, Abelardo Morrell, Tonight!

Wednesday Work: Abelardo Morrell - Coming to Philadelphia!

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Abelardo Morrell is coming back to Philadelphia!!! -> To the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC) on November 18th, 2010 @ 7:00pm!

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I had the pleasure of hearing Morell speak at the PMA in the Fall of 2006, at the onset of my graduate study. I had studied photography in undergrad, had made many photographs, and thought a little bit about the life of those photographs in the world - but I had never thought about the stuff that comes before the photographs, before the images are made, at the moment when they get caught. I had never thought about the mechanics and the machine involved in the act of making a photograph.

Had definitely never thought about it as another way to manipulate the image. *** This is what excites me.

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Abelardo Morell opened my eyes, with his images yes - but with his process double yes. To make these images posted here, Morell used rooms across the world (hotel rooms, gallery rooms, abandoned rooms, etc.) to make simple cameras, Camera Obscura. He made the rooms themselves into the camera by covering the windows in the room with light tight material and removing a one inch square in the center of the window in order to create a simple lens.

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Photography is the capture of light. The capture of light is done so by the camera. The camera is a glorified box used to hold light, let in by a little hole (the lens), until it can be recorded onto the light-sensitive material.

The earliest camera - the Camera Obscura - and the "cameras" Morell creates do not have the mirror system of the modern camera, the mirrors which flip the image over for our eyes to see the right way - therefore the images made in this way are upside down.

Morell's images of hotel rooms made into camera obscura contain not only the room which Morell's view camera sees, but also the image of what the room itself "sees" outside of its window, the image made by the camera obscura along the back walls of the hotel room. These light images of what the hotel room "sees" are cast as upside down images.

Sounds really complicated right?

Maybe, kinda.

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Check out more of Abelardo Morell's work at his website, here. See his process here. Learn more about the Camera Obscura and the basic science of photography, here.

Go to the PPAC's website here.

And attend Abelardo Morell's Artist Lecture & Book Signing

at the PPAC

on November 18th, 2010

at 7:00pm

here: Philadelphia Photo Arts Center

The Crane Building

1400 N. American St.

Philadelphia, PA.

Whew! Sometimes I exhaust myself...

PS Get outside & enjoy that weather - - NOW!

DEFY MONDAY: NOvember: Soup!

A "Kitchen -Sink- Soup" Fall Edition! What to do with all that overwhelming CSA? The weather is changing, cold salads are on the outs - unless (!) They are accompanied by a warm bowl of soup (and a crust of fresh bread) of course!

I had the good fortune to have a free chunk of time this weekend, a hankering, and with the CSA rotting - soup time it was.

On the counter up top we have: red cabbage! fennel! salt potatoes! a sweet potato! broccoli crowns! spinach! some carrots! and an onion! The counter below: cinnamon, Jamaican allspice, garlic powder, nutmeg, Nashville salt & pepper!

Not pictured: one pint of light cream, 2 lbs. of air-chilled boneless chicken breast, bullion cubes (both chicken and vegetable), and my super-secret ingredients: curry powder, and cayenne pepper.

The first thing I did was fill up the big old soup pot with 16 cups of water and bullion to start the broth. While I waited for that to boil, I cubed the chicken breasts and put them on the stove top to saute. I used 1 tbsp. olive oil, Nashville salt&pepper, garlic powder, nutmeg and curry powder.
For this step, I had a lot of help:

While that slow cooked, making a dark brown sweet garlicky syrup, I cut up the potatoes (both the salt and the sweet), then the broccoli and the carrot and added these to the stock pot.

The chicken was done, I put this aside in a bowl. Then using the sweet & sour syrup left behind in the pan, I sauteed two large white onions on the slow. (At this time I would like to thank my self-appointed sponsor: I would not have been able to get through this on the slow without my good friends from PBC. Philadelphia Brewing Company's Rowhouse Red today. Yum.)

Between sipping and onions cooking, I shredded the red cabbage, chopped the fennel and added them along with a large large handful of spinach to the stock pot to simmer.

While time continued to work its magic, I cut the chicken into even smaller morsels (I did not want a chicken soup, but I did want a hearty animal protein to peek in and out). Having that done, I added the chicken to the stock and then the onions, last but not least a pint of light cream, and all along, a shake of cinnamon here, a splash of allspice there, a forceful flick of garlic powder, a sprinkling of nutmeg, a dash of curry, a mild splash of cayenne pepper, and Nashville salt & pepper.

Put the pot on low and let it cook.

While I was waiting, PBC's Rowhouse Red and I cooked a pan of 101 Cookbook's Pumpkin and Feta Muffins, you can find that recipe here. I am not a huge fan of muffins, so I made it into a sort of large flat loaf using a 9x12 baking pan instead.

Suffice to say after an hour and half of this, the kitchen was rocking and the whole house smelled great! With the windows open, we even had company come by outside!

Big old cat on our cinder block fence. The backyard recently drenched. Dogs happy. Did I mention we were listening to Air? An unnecessary apple pie candle burning. The warm glow a of Rowhouse Red.

It was a wonderful, EASY, almost NOvember afternoon indeed!

***For your own twists on this recipe: cut the chicken and add sauteed tofu or seitan instead (now its vegetarian!), don't like cream? Try some unflavored soy milk. (mhmm - now its a vegan recipe!) Don't like spicy (Oh, I'm sorry! really.) Cut the curry, cut the cayenne - the cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice will leave you with a nice sweet soup- to this I encourage adding a diced apple, something hard, like a granny smith - but don't cook it with the soup, add it last minute to individual servings.

Anybody got a good crusty bread recipe? I need one!