May this year be filled with happiness, good health, and prosperity for all of us.
The New Year often signals a time to reflect on lessons learned in the old year and focus on hopes for the new. I have a few goals for this year. Pertaining to this blog, I have two:
1. Continue learning how to cook by experimenting with recipes from the Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library
2. Improve my food photography.
I worked predominantly as a photographer for almost fifteen years, and then part-time for another five. I still do portrait photography but have cut back significantly on event photography and commercial work. Food photography was never my area of expertise, but I did pick up a few tricks and tips tangentially. The food in photography is rarely cooked as it would be if you were to eat it, and there is good reason for that. For example, in this stew, Betty Crocker shows vibrant orange carrots and green peppers. I can tell by looking at those peppers that they are only slightly cooked and have likely been hand-placed in the bowl. If they were cooked to recipe instructions, they would not have that vibrant color or maintain that shape.
In commercial food photography, the goal is to present the food as it "might" look at its best. It doesn't need to be made according to recipe. It doesn't need to be edible. It doesn't even need to be made of the same ingredients. As long as the shot represents the best version of what the consumer might get, anything goes. For example, a fast-food burger can be staged with a garden-perfect red tomato, dewy lettuce, crisp bacon, and a fluffy bun. The burger you get will contain those ingredients, but the tomato might be pale pink, the lettuce wilted from the heat of the burger, and the bacon, a limp, fatty strip. However, all the components will be there. That beautiful scoop of ice cream might be made of vegetable shortening, but it looks like the ice cream you will eat and holds up longer under photo lights. Fries are never fully cooked and have likely been sprayed with hairspray for a nice sheen. All those hearty vegetables in the soup have risen to the top because there are marbles in the bottom of the bowl.
But I am making these Betty Crocker recipes to eat and I don't want to waste food just so I can get a better picture for my blog. I do want the food to look good, though, so I hope that learning more about lighting and staging for food will help compensate.
Meanwhile, here is my less than stellar looking "beef" stew. I don't have a soup tureen. I will sometimes go up to St. Vincent to see what dishware I can find, but a soup tureen takes up a lot of space for something I may or may not ever use again. So here are my mismatched dishes and utensils. That's not even a ladle. It's just a long-handled spoon.
I subbed button and shiitake mushrooms for the beef, but I did prepare the mushrooms in the same way as the recipe, coating them with flour, salt and pepper and browning them before adding the other ingredients. I did this only because I thought the flour might be in part a thickening agent for the stew. In addition to this flour coating, I added garlic for flavor. I once heard Jamie Oliver say that mushrooms and garlic were best friends and have remembered that tidbit for years. If I were to make this again, I would skip the flour coating here and simply sauté the mushrooms in avocado oil, garlic, salt and pepper and then add a little butter to finish. The next step calls for simmering the meat for two hours. Naturally, mushrooms don't need to be simmered in the same way meat does, so being a vegetarian can save you some time, it turns out. I did add the slurry at the end because at the last minute I decided I wanted a thick stew to pour over rice. I used three tablespoons and were I to make it again, I would use two. I think even without the flour from the coating of the mushrooms, two would be plenty. It's easier to add more than to take away. I would also reduce the tablespoon of salt (the additional salt the recipe calls for, not the salt for sautéing the mushrooms) and instead add just a teaspoon of salt and other herbs such as rosemary.
I was disappointed in the results in terms of how it looked, but it tasted fine. It wasn't anything special, but it was fine. I've learned an important lesson over the past few recipes, though. Halving a recipe when testing it for the first time might be the way to go. There was way too much stew here, even after I gave some away.
Rating: 3 Red Spoons: A basic stew, good for cold winter days.
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