And just like that I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging again, mostly because I’ve been working my ass off (though it’s funny that it never seems to diminish in size).
Much to catch up on, but in the meantime I’m just going to send you over to Coco + Kelley for my latest recipe. These little tartlets are such fun to make and a real taste of early summer. 
Just back from a lovely Spring Break in San Francisco and Mexico (of which more anon) and dashing in to tell you to head over to Coco + Kelley blog, where you’ll find my recipe for rhubarb, orange and thyme crostini.
They’re a great savoury way to use rhubarb and look so pretty and spring-like. And now to get back to my unpacking. I’ll be back soon.
Last October I taught a food photography workshop with my dear friend Danielle Acken in Fowey, Cornwall (of which more in another post) and there was a lot of talk of entering the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Competition, a specialist food photography competition sponsored by Pink Lady Apples in the UK, but with global reach and prestige. I’d never entered a competition before, but I’ve been wanting to get my work out there, so it seemed like I had nothing to lose.
But you still could have knocked me down with a feather when my images were shortlisted in four different categories. What’s even more gratifying is that the images chosen represent three different facets of my work, so I couldn’t be more pleased. The shortlisted images are chosen anonymously by an international panel of incredible judges, who also choose the finalists. However, there’s also a People’s Choice finalist in each category, which is where you guys come in.
The image above, which I took at Robert Ramsay Cellars, is a pure portrait. I do love shooting at wineries – the barrels curve and bend the light like nobody’s business and when you add in a good-looking winemaker, magic happens. It’s been shortlisted in the Wine Photographer of the Year – People section, sponsored by Errazuriz and I would love you forever if you could vote for it here.
I thought I’d make an effort for the Pink Lady – Apple a Day category. I’d been seeing apple roses all over the Internet, and though it would be fun to make some with Pink Lady apples (I’ll post the recipe up later). Cue me burning a couple of attempts and then desperately trying to conjure light out of a dull January afternoon in Seattle. But in the end I got the shot I was aiming for.
The final two images are street photography/culinary travel photography pure and simple. The first one was taken in the Marais last year. I was first struck by the beautiful green of the doors and then noticed that they framed an incredibly French scene of joy in food and friendship. This one is shortlisted in the Food for Celebration category.
And finally were in this little restaurant in Tuscany, when, as we were leaving, the ‘chef’ emerged from her tiny kitchen at the back. It had obviously been hard work preparing all our meals, and at the moment she clearly couldn’t wait to see the back of us. She is in the Food For Sale category, and I love how she encapsulates the harsh realities of getting food onto our tables. She is me when I’ve been catering for a big party.
If you’d like to vote for any of the three images above, they are shortlisted in the Food section and you can vote for them here (you get one vote for Food and one for Wine) and again I promise to love you for ever and a day.
Thank you dear friends! I’ll let you know how things pan out.
If you’re remotely interested in food photography, I urge you to check out all the galleries. There is some astonishing work in there. And contributions from good friends Ilva Beretta, Danielle Acken, Sofia Plana, Sandrine Fauconnet and Melissa Love.
Occasionally developing recipes is easy. I dream up a flavour combination, figure out the technicalities, make a test version and bam! it works first time.
This, however, was not one of those occasions. This cake, that I made last winter for Edible Seattle, kicked my ass forwards, backwards and into the middle of next week. This recipe is based on a traditional Italian ‘torta di polenta’, to which I thought some seasonal rhubarb would be a lovely addition. And when you have rhubarb, then it’s not much of stretch to pair that with orange and cardamom.
What I couldn’t figure out though, was how to incorporate the pieces of rhubarb to make the cake look pretty enough to go in a magazine. Although my family will eat anything that tastes good and is vaguely cake-shaped, for a magazine you need to have somewhat higher standards.
First I tried to make it like an upside-down cake. The concentric circles of rhubarb looked pretty, but the anaemic yellow of the cake’s underside made the whole thing look like an unappetisingly pallid frittata, which I soon gave up trying to photograph. But boy was it good – with its damp, buttery richness offset by the tang of the rhubarb and citrus and the pleasing bite of the polenta.
For my next trick I painstakingly arranged the rhubarb in concentric circles on the top of the cake. It looked magnificent and my hopes were high. Until I dropped it as I was carrying it to the oven. I scraped it back into the tin (thank goodness for the five second rule) and baked it, and the family loved it because it was cake, but it wasn’t anything I could photograph.
I whipped up another cake, again made an intricate rhubarb design on the top, managed to get it into the oven in one piece and then the rhubarb design promptly sank into the cake while it was baking. All I can say is that it’s a good job this cake is so delicious.
By now I was coming up against the copy deadline. This time round I abandoned the concentric circles and made up for rhubarb sinkage by sprinkling the top with some sliced almonds. And finally I got a cake I could use. With the deadline looming and in the flat winter light of a rainy December afternoon, I managed to grab a few shots, which I felt were OK.
So you could have knocked me down with a feather when my cake somehow wound up on the cover.
You really do need to make this cake. It may not be the world’s prettiest, but when you’re curled up with a good book and a coffee on a damp spring afternoon, there really is nothing better.
Oh how I have missed blogging.
I’ve had all sorts of beautiful (to me at least) posts lined up in my head over the last few months, but life always got in the way and they never quite made it onto the screen.
It’s partly because I’ve been lucky enough to have a ton of work. Somehow I’ve managed to parlay this food photography, recipe development, writing and content development gig of mine into an actual job, with several regular clients, including Edible Seattle, Seattle Refined and Zagat’s and a bunch of one-off gigs that have been hugely enjoyable and very rewarding (if not always financially).
I’ve also been travelling like crazy. Over the last year and a bit I’ve averaged over a trip a month, which has been total madness, but has left me with a bunch of photos and impressions I’d still love to share with you.
And other stuff has been happening behind the scenes. In October I went back to England, this time to teach a food photography workshop with my dear friend Danielle Acken in the glorious surroundings of Fowey in Cornwall. I love teaching and we’re planning more workshops together throughout the year, so stay tuned for news of those.
I’ve also been working on building my photography portfolio, rebranding my sites, including this blog, and bringing everything together under one big umbrella. I had an update meeting with my web designer this morning and I’ve been grinning with crazy excitement ever since. It’s going to be so pretty!
And I am bursting with ideas for a newsletter, a podcast, a couple of online workshops, and maybe even a quarterly magazine, that I really want to share with you.
In short, it’s time I got back to regular blogging. I hope you’ll join me back here next Wednesday.
I’ve started contributing a regular monthly recipe and photos to lifestyle blog Coco + Kelley . So click here for my recipe for Roasted Romanesco Soup with a Pistachio Pesto and Crispy Prosciutto – it’s warm and comforting enough for the tail end of winter, and pastel pretty enough for the beginning of spring.
‘”I’m thoughtful when I come to class. My aim this weekend is to bring more personality and feeling to my writing and photography, to transform the sterile and soulless and help it resonate with a wider audience.
Telling stories like this doesn’t come easily to me – I’m not an emotional person – but I know that the proof of the pudding is in the story; that it’s the tale that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, that illuminates the subject and makes it come alive.
The gilded smoky scent of roasted vegetables emanates from the oven. Aran has made lunch. I fix myself a plate of roasted squash, beets and carrots, perfumed with oil and herbs and speckled with spices. The tender squash is velvet smooth, the flavours nutty, complex and cosily sweet, the subtle colours running the gamut from gold to caramel by way of saffron, ochre and honey. In contrast, an uncooked squash sits on the counter with dishes of fresh raw carrots and beets. The raw vegetables are hard, knobbly – their colours almost aggressively vibrant – subtlety is clearly not their thing.
I chew thoughtfully on the warm soft velvety squash. I know now what I need to do. Roast my stories to bring out their flavour and sweetness. Texture them with salt and herbs and fragrant oils to reveal their hidden subtleties and complexity. Knock off their hard edges and soften their crunch to make them palatable and sweet.
I take another bite. Food for thought indeed.”
Ugh. The above is a writing exercise I did at the second workshop I took last October at Aran Goyoaga’s studio with the very lovely and inimitable Tara O’Brady (check out Luisa Brimble’s fab workshop here). All I can say is that I most definitely haven’t found my ‘voice’ yet. To me something like the above still sounds pretentious and inauthentic and I have to fight the urge to be snarky even when I’m writing about feelings and emotions that are actually genuine and real. Maybe snark is my authentic voice. I dunno. The only thing I know is that this food writing malarkey is hard, people.
Tara on the other hand makes it all look easy. The author of the wonderful Seven Spoons blog, she writes with a genuine depth of emotion that I can only dream of achieving; develops all her own distinctive and tempting recipes and does all her own food styling and photography. In her house. In between looking after her kids.
She’s also an amazing teacher. We focused during the workshop on writing and photographing with intention and purpose; developing and building a connection with your audience and how to evoke atmosphere and emotions with both words and photography.
It was heady stuff and brought to us by an accomplished wordsmith, who, unlike some purely visual people, could actually explain her thought processes and ideas. If you get the chance to be taught by Tara, jump at it.
The above is a quick iPhone shot of the soup that Tara is styling and photographing above. Girl is a genius AND she’s bringing out her first cookbook later this year. Jump at that too. We saw galleys and it looks FABULOUS.
Fancy Hotel of the Week-Villa Chan Grajang. Well, it’s not quite a hotel, but an absolutely stunning and very large private villa, but since it comes equipped with its own Thai chef, large staff and the most wonderful housekeeper ever, it feels like you’re staying in your very own exclusive boutique hotel and therefore seems to work for the purposes of this ongoing series (which I’m sure none of you remember, it’s been so long since I last did a Fancy Hotel post).
One of the reasons I jumped at the chance to go to Thailand for a retreat with life coach Susan Hyatt was the fact that Miz Susan doesn’t do anything by halves. When she was organising her retreat she went straight to a website called AwesomeVillas.com which, awesomely, specialises in, you guessed it, awesome villas. Except that the villa we ended up in – the Villa Chan Grajang overlooking Surin Beach – was more than awesome. Stupendous and sensational are superlatives that come to mind, and, judging by the collective intake of breath that occurred when we all arrived, I guess breathtaking would fit the bill too.
As you all know I have a terrible weakness for stunning architecture (an astrologer friend blames it on my moon in Libra), and, after living in Kinfolk in last week’s blog post, this was more akin to taking a vacation in Architectural Digest.
I was so happy here. The lines and symmetry of the buildings were incredibly soothing to the eye and to the soul; the saltwater pool was the perfect blue and the perfect length, and the minimalism of the buildings just served to enhance the spectacular planting and views. Everywhere you looked there was a new vista or detail to observe – a reflection, a shape, a shadow or a texture. My eyes were drowning in beauty, yet relishing every moment and it felt almost spiritually uplifting. It was an object lesson in how our surroundings can affect our moods and mental well-being for good or for ill, and one that I need to apply to my own untidy bedroom and office.
 |
 |
Obviously we had to find out who was the lucky owner of such gorgeousness, and after a few judicious moments with Google, Susan worked out that it was the artist Damien Hirst. Which figured, as its cool white lines were not so very different from the cool white lines of his restaurant Pharmacy, which I used to live close to in my Notting Hill days. I don’t think I’ve been so jealous of a person in my life.
Mr Hirst, if I promise never to call you a charlatan again, will you invite me back to your astonishing house?
The beauty of the villa was only enhanced by the tranquil presence of Pom the housekeeper – one of many people I met in Thailand who are beautiful both inside and out – and her wonderful staff. I adored the Thai way of decorating with fresh flowers and little flourishes. The Thais take such pleasure in beautifying the everyday, which is another lesson I need to take to heart.
 |
 |
 |
 |
The view from my bedroom
The food was faintly astonishing too – with mindboggling depths of overlapping spices, flavours and textures, presented again in the most beautiful way. Believe me, the overly salty and sugary Thai food you can find in the US or UK bears little resemblance to the subtle intricacies of the dishes we were served. In my next life I want to come back as someone who has a live-in Thai chef. Surely that wouldn’t be too much to ask?
I loved this place. Loved, loved, loved it and couldn’t bear to leave. One day I will return. That’s a promise.
The villa was even gorgeous in the rain
Did you notice all the beautiful women in this post? My fellow retreaters were some of the loveliest, kindest, most creative, thoughtful and inspirational people you could wish to meet. It was a privilege to get to know them.
The Villa Chan Grajang is available to rent through Awesome Villas. Please take me with you.
The most wonderful thing about this food photography world that I find myself being increasingly drawn into, are food photographers themselves. For some reason which has so far eluded me, they are among the kindest, most generous, most creative and most inspiring people you could wish to meet, and none more so than Luisa Brimble and Aran Goyoaga.
Aran was ably assisted by Luisa’s friend Adriana
As you may know Aran has recently moved to Seattle and started hosting workshops in her beautiful downtown studio. When I heard she had invited Sydney-based food and lifestyle photographer Luisa Brimble to host a workshop I jumped at the chance to attend – Luisa has shot for The Simple Things, Frankie and Kinfolk amongst others and has recently founded her own magazine in Australia, Alphabet Family Journal, because that’s what you do when your home magazine market is small and opportunities are limited.
She is also a firecracker in person – bursting with life, wit and enthusiasm – with an infectious energy and a warm, generous smile; and her photography is a dazzling combination of graphic simplicity infused with Aussie sunshine, exuberant colour and vibrant personality.
Luisa is particularly known for her overhead shots of people feasting around loaded tables, and she’d promised to give us a demonstration of how she puts such shots together. All this, plus Aran’s amazing food styling and the incredible beauty of the studio – honestly, people, it’s just like living in Instagram – made for a weekend that I won’t easily forget.
While we chatted about photography with Luisa, and she told us how she had built her career through hard work, focus and determination (and I’m sure enormous talent and bucketloads of charm did no harm), Aran worked her food styling magic.
Luisa then climbed her ladder and starting directing the photo shoot – as an ex-wedding photographer she is adept at getting the most out of her models. I, by contrast, just wish I could spritz the people I’m photographing with olive oil and manipulate them with tweezers, which is probably not the best approach.
And this is the beauty that emerges when two huge talents collaborate (just a phone shot from me as there wasn’t room for us all up the ladder).
Luisa then did one of her trademark ‘person with armful of flowers standing on a chair’ shots. Seeing her work with, and get the best out of, people was one of the most inspiring things about this weekend.
See what I mean about living in Instagram?
We then got a chance to do our own photography and styling.
And it was lovely to have tame and now fully-trained hand models available.
Everything – food, props, light – was so darn BEAUTIFUL.
Later that weekend we had the opportunity to watch and shoot Aran as she baked and styled a galette. It’s amazingly soothing watching her bake. She has a quiet serenity and focus about her which is quite mesmerising, particularly considering she was surrounded by loads of cameras when these shots were taken. (NB I am not remotely like this when I am cooking, but I think you probably guessed that already).
I learned a ton over the weekend – about photography, food styling, how to build a photography career, build rapport with models and how to bake with methodical calmness. But also, and more importantly, I learned lessons from two very different women about how to live life with enthusiasm, grace, focus and immense and inspiring style. Well worth the price of admission I’d say.
And yes, I shall forever feel inadequate that my eggs are not arranged by colour.
Aran is planning to bring more amazing photographers to Seattle in 2015. Check her blog or social media feeds for more workshop details in the New Year.
This woman was everything, everything
Dear hearts. I can’t believe how long it’s been since I killed some pixels in the service of this blog.
I have no truly compelling excuse, but have been busy with a new freelance job researching and writing a weekly travel post for Seattle Refined (all enticing ideas for travel which will appeal to a Pacific Northwest audience gratefully received).
Then most of October seemed to be swallowed up by a two week trip to Thailand, and the resultant packing, unpacking and crippling jetlag. Brace yourselves now for total Thai overload. I am totally, ridiculously obsessed with the country, its people and dear god, the food.
Just to whet your appetite, I attended the magnificent Blue Elephant cooking school in Phuket Town on the last day of my trip and part of the class involved a brisk walk round the most fabulous wet market. We only had half an hour or so here as part of our workshop, which was tragic really, as I could easily have photographed here all day, every day for the rest of my life and not got bored.
All human, and, so it seems, aquatic, life is here, chaps, and I learned much about Thailand and its people.
I learned that smiling is Thailand’s national sport and the Thai people are Olympic-level practitioners.
Possibly because their babies are Olympic-levels of cute.
Though I wasn’t quite sure about this comedy tee-shirt ( and neither, it seems, were they).
I learned that Thais are also quite amazingly beautiful.
As is their seafood.
 |
 |
 |
 |
They enjoy hacking at things with big cleavers.
 |
 |
Yes, that is a frog.
They will eat all parts of an animal (as is only right and proper).
Yes, that is blood.
And they are somewhat fond of chillies in all their forms.
And there is no such thing as too many coconuts.
I would give my eye teeth (if I knew what they were) to be able to shop in a market like that every day. Wouldn’t you?
Come and visit the markets of Campo de’ Fiori, Rome and the Cote d’Azur with me. Markets make me happy.
