The world of food styling and versatile blogger award

Kladdkaka / Swedish Brownie

Food Diary (October 09, 2011)

Breakfast: Rolled oats with plums, sunflower seeds and flax seeds

Lunch: Chickpeas with flatbread

Dinner: Roasted parsnip and onions, pickled apple and carrot salad

Baking/sweets: Kladdkaka / Swedish Brownie

Sometimes it happens that we buy chocolate for baking but the chocolate mysteriously disappears. Chocolates have a tendency to disappear and never reappear again! The Kladdkaka recipe comes to the rescue, it does not require chocolate, just cocoa powder. The result is just as good. It seems that it is normal for chocolates to mysteriously disappear in Sweden, hence such recipes are developed. The recipe is available here.

I recently received the food bloggers equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Versatile Bloggers Award. The award is courtesy of the very versatile Sissi from With a Glass blog. She got an award too and I am happy to be invited into this private and exclusive club. The award comes with obligations, I need to share 7 random facts about me and pass on the award to 7 bloggers. That’s not so difficult since none of you know me, but finding 7 things to write is not easy either. Here’s my attempt to claim the award:

1. Three is my favourite number and I love cookies, amongst other things, hence Three Cookies

2. Food memories are so powerful, it instantly transports us back in time, and tends to stick in our memory. When strawberry jam is mentioned my first thought usually goes to the free buffet breakfast that was offered at a backpackers I stayed at in Singapore. I suspect the jam had traces of strawberry in it, I could be wrong though. Free breakfast at backpackers, it exceeded expectations, but I am complaining, I am only human.

3. One of the most disgusting meal memories I have is from Thailand. I was travelling by bus and we stopped for a buffet lunch that was offered to all passengers. Fantastic spread of food, as one would expect in Thailand. One of the items was white meat, chicken I thought. I took a chunk of ‘chicken’, placed in my mouth and felt something round. I chewed, the round thing broke, slimy gelatinous liquid oozed out and I felt a small ‘stone’. I had just eaten a fish eye ball. Now I see in Zimmerman’s Bizarre Foods that he finds it delicious. I guess it is if you eat is knowingly.

4. At university I had a friend from Tonga who normally finished a Big Mac in 3 bites. And one Big Mac was not enough for him. Yes he was big, and maybe still is.

5. The most attractive shower I have ever seen was at the dayroom/gym shower at Kuala Lumpur airport. The shower has dark stones. I think of it regularly but I don’t remember what I ate that day. Strange.

6. Once when I was in high school I bought bacon ham. I made bacon ham sandwich for lunch. It was very chewy but I finished it with some difficulty. In the evening the family that I was staying with told me that it has to be cooked, it shouldn’t be eaten raw. I didn't get food poisoning, never managed to figure out what bacon ham is and that’s the only time I have eaten raw pork. In case you haven’t tried, raw bacon is very chewy.

7. I used to go fishing quite often before. One day we kept catching crabs, lots of big ones. It was so annoying since both my friend and I are allergic to crabs. We threw it all back in the ocean and went home empty handed I think. Our friends were annoyed that we didn’t bring the crabs back, we were annoyed that we caught them in the first place. The crabs won in this case, one of the rare occasions I guess.

Alright, the party is over, now it is your turn. If you are born in September anytime between the years 1914-2010, congratulations you have received the Versatile Award from me. Please own up, don’t be shy! You don’t have to tell us your age, just 7 things about you.

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Bon a croquer

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: BBC

BBC has an interesting article titled “The glamorous life of a food stylist”. The world is so complex that there is a profession called ‘food styling’. There are also professional ‘food cookers’, ‘food eaters’, ‘food photographers’ and ‘food bloggers’. Whats next?

Anyway, here are a few interesting stuff I read in the article. The days of using shaving foam in lieu of whipped cream, mashed potatoes in lieu of ice cream is gone. Now food is shot pretty much as it’s cooked. I found it interesting that mashed potato for example was used instead of ice cream because ice cream would melt during the photo shoot. Essentially the photo was ‘faked’ since the photo would say ice cream when in fact it was mashed potato. Whats the point of showing pictures of something that will not be served? 

More often than not, the food stylist cooks and arranges food in a photographer’s studio, its not the chef cooking.

Most magazines and TV shows are filmed a few months ahead. So most food stylists probably had their fair share of cooking and eating Christmas dinners and treats already this summer.

Up to five or six dishes with accompaniments are cooked in a day. This sounds a lot but its harder when the recipes aren’t working, and this is more common than we might think.

One stylist, Mari Williams, did a job for a client that sells rice. Her work involved hand-picking grains of rice of a certain length, shape and colour and arranging them with tweezers. On another occasion the stylist had to arrange a display of 52 varieties of whole fresh fish. She probably did not want to see or eat fish after this, at least for a few days.

Here is what a stylist did to make a lump of lentils look appetizing.

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