Hannah and her friends at the beach- thanks for the picture Rachel.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
mmmm....more pie please
I ended up making 6 pies this weekend for a pioneer party: 2 each of Brown Bag Apple (you actually bake it in a brown paper sack in the oven), Peach Custard (with a delicious streusel-like topping), and Sour Cream Lemon. We came home with 1/2 a pie and Ryan has pretty much polished it off by now.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
summer fun
Swimming lessons
Pee Wee Picasso art classThe other day I was out to lunch with a friend and we went to a place that had kids menu's and crayons. About mid-way through eating our salads I looked over at Hannah and I discovered that she had created a mural on the wallpaper using a purple crayon. And we're not talking about just a little scribble. My first reaction was shock, followed by laughing. I tried not to smile and encourage her, but I couldn't help it. I quickly pulled out my baby wipes and tried to scrub it off. Our server saw me and came over to tell me that this happens all of the time and they would clean it off later. That's my little Picasso!
Thursday, July 24, 2008
fast food
Here's something interesting: http://www.thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm. When I first saw this website it reminded me of a show that I saw when I was a kid about what food stylists do. It was so interesting to discover all of the techniques used to make the food that we see in pictures. I was fascinated by the fact that they used glue as a stand-in for milk on a cereal spoon, or that they would put varnish all over an uncooked turkey and then cut and slice and steam it with a clothes steamer to get the right coloring. Here are some other tips I found:
1. Meat tends to dry out and shrink when you cook it, so chances are the meat in the photo is only partially cooked, to keep it plump and juicy. Then it may be browned up with a coat of gravy browning or soy sauce and a hot air gun or blowtorch called upon to crisp up the edges. A final coat of oil gives a hot, fresh-looking shine.
2. A hamburger straight out of the wrap doesn’t usually look too inspiring (as most people would have experienced). That’s why creating a burger photo is a long and involved process. First find the perfect bun — you might have to trawl through hundreds, and even then it might need a few more sesame seeds glued on in strategic places. The meat patty is given a make-up job and perfect tomato slices and lettuce frills are chosen — hard to believe, but one stylist told us it might take her four lettuces to find the perfect leaf. Then you’ve got to construct the thing — layers are separated with cardboard or plastic to stop sogging and squashing, and pins hold it all in place and make sure the lettuce sits just so (see above).
3. You know what happens to breakfast cereal when it sits in milk — soggy cereal’s not a good look. How to fix it? PVA glue does a much better job than milk. The flakes stay put and stay crisp.
4. If you’re shooting a slice of cake, the air and lights make it dry out — but a shot of hairspray gets it back looking fresh and yummy.
5. Ever noticed chocolate sauce doesn’t stay put on top of ice cream for long? Get it to stay by cutting out a sauce-splodge-shaped piece of paper towel and putting it on the ice cream — then the sauce sticks to the towel. And on the subject of ice cream — it melts, and fast. Some stylists still work with real ice cream — in editorial shots a bit of melt is OK: it makes the reader feel they want to lick it right off the page. But in product shots, it’s got to look perfect and that’s not easy — one tutorial on getting the perfect scoop of real ice cream is almost five A4 pages long and advises having as many as 20 two-litre tubs of ice cream on hand for each shot, not to mention more than 20 kilos of dry ice and an electric saw. If you’re not advertising the ice cream, you might decide to go fake — coloured mashed potato can make a reasonable substitute. Or instead there are various recipes using corn syrup, margarine, icing sugar and colouring to achieve just the right consistency — depending whether you want super-premium ice cream or a lower-fat look.
6. Maple syrup soaks into pancakes and goes a nasty dark colour — but not when you’ve sprayed the pancakes with fabric protector. Pin your carefully ‘scattered’ blueberries in place so they don’t get swept away with the syrup flow.
7. Plastic ice cubes (usually acrylic) don’t melt and spoil a drink shot. And to get that frosted look on the glass, spray it with a dulling spray and then give it a spritz with water spray.
8. Anyone who’s served up a slice of pie knows how it can disintegrate before you get it to the plate. Make it more stable by baking a pie full of instant mashed potato, then cut a slice, scoop out a little potato and put the filling on the side — the chunks neatly pinned in place.
If you want a perfect drip of sauce glistening on the side of your dessert, use a small piece of soft wax shaped like a drop and put it in place, then coat the drop with sauce for a perfect mid-drip shot.
9. If you don’t want tomato sauce to run everywhere, mixing it with some tomato paste thickens it enough so it stays perfectly in place. Put it exactly where you want it with a syringe.
A simple white sauce with the right mix of colouring can double for sauces which are much more delicate beasts, like hollandaise.
10. A thin painted-on coat of glycerine makes seafood look juicy. And tossing some liquid glucose through noodles makes them keep a hot, fresh look. Stir-fries and things like pasta sauce are often not cooked according to the recipe — each vegie is selected and individually cooked, then put together with the sauce. Often the careful arrangement designed to look random is the result of painstaking work.
11. Maple syrup is much more popular in the US than here, and there are all sorts of tricks to getting it looking right, the most bizarre of which we heard being to use motor oil instead (as long as it’s the pancakes being advertised, not the syrup).
12. If your Swiss cheese isn’t looking photogenic enough, enhance its holes — use little round cutters or even straws for small holes.
13. Spray deodorant can give a nice frosting to grapes.
14. The perfectly shaped chicken leg can be achieved by injecting mashed potato under the skin and coating.
***So if the next picture I post looks a little too good to be true.....
1. Meat tends to dry out and shrink when you cook it, so chances are the meat in the photo is only partially cooked, to keep it plump and juicy. Then it may be browned up with a coat of gravy browning or soy sauce and a hot air gun or blowtorch called upon to crisp up the edges. A final coat of oil gives a hot, fresh-looking shine.
2. A hamburger straight out of the wrap doesn’t usually look too inspiring (as most people would have experienced). That’s why creating a burger photo is a long and involved process. First find the perfect bun — you might have to trawl through hundreds, and even then it might need a few more sesame seeds glued on in strategic places. The meat patty is given a make-up job and perfect tomato slices and lettuce frills are chosen — hard to believe, but one stylist told us it might take her four lettuces to find the perfect leaf. Then you’ve got to construct the thing — layers are separated with cardboard or plastic to stop sogging and squashing, and pins hold it all in place and make sure the lettuce sits just so (see above).
3. You know what happens to breakfast cereal when it sits in milk — soggy cereal’s not a good look. How to fix it? PVA glue does a much better job than milk. The flakes stay put and stay crisp.
4. If you’re shooting a slice of cake, the air and lights make it dry out — but a shot of hairspray gets it back looking fresh and yummy.
5. Ever noticed chocolate sauce doesn’t stay put on top of ice cream for long? Get it to stay by cutting out a sauce-splodge-shaped piece of paper towel and putting it on the ice cream — then the sauce sticks to the towel. And on the subject of ice cream — it melts, and fast. Some stylists still work with real ice cream — in editorial shots a bit of melt is OK: it makes the reader feel they want to lick it right off the page. But in product shots, it’s got to look perfect and that’s not easy — one tutorial on getting the perfect scoop of real ice cream is almost five A4 pages long and advises having as many as 20 two-litre tubs of ice cream on hand for each shot, not to mention more than 20 kilos of dry ice and an electric saw. If you’re not advertising the ice cream, you might decide to go fake — coloured mashed potato can make a reasonable substitute. Or instead there are various recipes using corn syrup, margarine, icing sugar and colouring to achieve just the right consistency — depending whether you want super-premium ice cream or a lower-fat look.
6. Maple syrup soaks into pancakes and goes a nasty dark colour — but not when you’ve sprayed the pancakes with fabric protector. Pin your carefully ‘scattered’ blueberries in place so they don’t get swept away with the syrup flow.
7. Plastic ice cubes (usually acrylic) don’t melt and spoil a drink shot. And to get that frosted look on the glass, spray it with a dulling spray and then give it a spritz with water spray.
8. Anyone who’s served up a slice of pie knows how it can disintegrate before you get it to the plate. Make it more stable by baking a pie full of instant mashed potato, then cut a slice, scoop out a little potato and put the filling on the side — the chunks neatly pinned in place.
If you want a perfect drip of sauce glistening on the side of your dessert, use a small piece of soft wax shaped like a drop and put it in place, then coat the drop with sauce for a perfect mid-drip shot.
9. If you don’t want tomato sauce to run everywhere, mixing it with some tomato paste thickens it enough so it stays perfectly in place. Put it exactly where you want it with a syringe.
A simple white sauce with the right mix of colouring can double for sauces which are much more delicate beasts, like hollandaise.
10. A thin painted-on coat of glycerine makes seafood look juicy. And tossing some liquid glucose through noodles makes them keep a hot, fresh look. Stir-fries and things like pasta sauce are often not cooked according to the recipe — each vegie is selected and individually cooked, then put together with the sauce. Often the careful arrangement designed to look random is the result of painstaking work.
11. Maple syrup is much more popular in the US than here, and there are all sorts of tricks to getting it looking right, the most bizarre of which we heard being to use motor oil instead (as long as it’s the pancakes being advertised, not the syrup).
12. If your Swiss cheese isn’t looking photogenic enough, enhance its holes — use little round cutters or even straws for small holes.
13. Spray deodorant can give a nice frosting to grapes.
14. The perfectly shaped chicken leg can be achieved by injecting mashed potato under the skin and coating.
***So if the next picture I post looks a little too good to be true.....
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
name that cereal
I eat cereal everyday for breakfast. I really really like it. Sometimes I eat it for lunch and dinner too. I like a lot of different kinds of cereal and if you were to go into my cupboard right now you'd see 14 different boxes. (I stock up when they're on sale because who wants to pay over $5 a box?) Hannah likes cereal too and the first thing she says in the morning, besides Mommy is "cee-cee please". That's my cue to fill up a bowl and let her go at it with a spoon. She likes the healthy stuff like Total, Fiber One, or even All Bran. The closest she's come to the sugary dessert cereal is Honey Bunches of Oats. I remember when my sisters and I were little we'd peruse the cereal aisle and pick out what we wanted. We rarely looked at what the cereal was called, only what awesome prize was inside waiting for us to open. Of course we had to bypass the huge bagged generic cereal- nothing good inside those ones. We usually ended up getting Trix, Alpha-Bits, Fruit Loops, or some other delicous sugar coated puff. Those were the days. I guess the cereal companies have gotten meaner because I don't see those awesome prizes anymore when I'm going down the aisle. If you like cereal, try taking this quiz:
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Tofu Tasting
While we were living in Tokyo a few years ago Ryan convinced me to go to a restaurant that only serves tofu. It took some convincing when he told me that you basically just get a tray full of tofu prepared lots of different ways. I was skeptical. The picture above is what came to our table- including the tofu milk (my least favorite thing) and some tofu ice cream (actually really good). I think that my favorite dish was the deep fried kind called agedashi (bottom right-hand corner). Deep fried = tasty. So this is my plug for tofu. I didn't like it at first- I think that I just had to get over the idea that I had in my head that it would be gross, bland, and slimy. If you need some convincing you could always hop on a plane to Japan and taste the good stuff.
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