My best friend Shana has agreed to post some of her excellent cooking to A Chef’s Daughter and I couldn’t be more excited! I’ll let her introduce herself in her own words below, but first an explanation of this most excellent picture of her:

This is hands-down my favorite picture of Shana ever, and it’s not just because I took the picture myself. We went to a chicken fabrication class at Fleishers (more on that later) and while I got all freaked out by the process of killing the chickens, Shana kept her cool and stepped up to the plate. You can see the blood-stained wall behind her where the chicken was headed . . . so Shana’s expression makes perfect sense!

Now that that’s explained, here’s Shana:

Hey everyone!  I want to take this opportunity to introduce myself.  I’m Shana and I’ll be posting to this here blog every now and again.  While I’m not a chef’s daughter, I am a chef’s sister.  As my mother always says proudly, necessity is the mother of invention and so she produced a chef for a son and a foodie for a daughter.

Ivete and I have been friends for many years and we’ve made some great meals together such as Poblano Albondigas Soup and Ricotta Gnudi with Wild Mushroom and Truffle Sauce, among quite a few others.  I look forward to sharing my culinary experiences with you all.

xoxo,

Shana

Brown butter oyster mushrooms -- recipe coming soon!

Inspired by The Purple Foodie’s Happy 2010 post, I started thinking about the cooking goals I’ve put off for too long but hope to reach in 2010. In no particular order, here’s a list of what I want to try this year:

• Make marshmallows from scratch
• Pick up the BBA challenge where I left off (Italian bread, YUM!)
• Make fresh pasta
• Make souffle
• Cook with quinoa and other other unusual starches
• Grow herbs on my windowsill
• Improve my cake assembly and decorating skills (if you know me IRL, expect an elaborate cake for your birthday this year!)
• Make more candy and learn more about sugar work
• Host a theme dinner party (this one was inspired by Alejandra’s awesome 60′s-themed Christmas party)

I could keep going but this seems like a pretty big list already . . . what are your cooking goals for 2010?

You’ve probably noticed the silence around here and I do apologize for my pathetic posting ratio over the last few months. I’m making a renewed effort in 2010 to post more, cook more, and enjoy life more! One of the ways I plan to “enjoy life” is by spending more time following my passions. Cooking is certainly up there on the list! As is photography, which fortunately pairs well with the cooking where this blog is concerned . . .

I’m giving 2009 a swift kick in the rear as it exits and am welcoming 2010 with open arms! Hope you’ll all be with me for the ride!

Sorry for the confusion folks! Elissa’s first post will be back up (with pictures!) shortly, but she deserves a proper introduction first, don’t you think?

Elissa is one of my best foodie friends and she inspires me to try to cook every night, the way she does. When she recently mentioned to me that she was thinking of starting her own cooking blog, I jumped right in there and asked her to join mine instead! When we realized that she, like me, is also A Chef’s Daughter? Well, then we knew it was meant to be!

You’ll see our names on our posts so that you can keep us apart . . . but you may be able to tell who’s who in other ways, too. I’ll be the one cooking fatty things I should stay away from (I ate ribs, burgers, and deep-fried things this weekend) and she’ll be the one focusing on healthy food . . .

Please join me in welcoming Elissa to A Chef’s Daughter!

I like the mood of the light in this shot

When I first started putting pictures of my cooking up on the internet (over on my knitting blog) I had no idea what I was doing. As I read more and more cooking blogs and got more and more jealous of other blogger’s photography skills, I decided some thought and research was in order so that I could stop being embarrassed at my horrible pictures. I did take a photography class in high school (obviously not digital photography!) and I was even the photo editor of my HS newspaper (I know, such an achievement!), so I did know how to use a camera, but I didn’t know how to take good food/still life shots. Of course I’m still learning, but I’ve definitely come a long way! Here are some of the resources that helped me improve and some of the tips that had the biggest impact.

I clearly remember the first time I actually noticed amazing food photography on a site, and that was on Smitten Kitchen. Deb takes beautiful shots that convey motion and the cooking process; something about her photos makes you feel like you’re actually next to her in the kitchen, not just looking at a website. And the lighting in her pictures is always to-die-for! So naturally when I went on my hunt for food photography tutorials, I checked out her food photos post first.

If you go to that link you’ll see that the first thing she says is what every other resource says, too. To quote Deb:

The majority of food photography advice I have read boils down to two main points: don’t use flash and style the food attractively.

These two points may seem small and you (like me!) may even have said “duh” in your head when you read them, but when I stopped to think about it I realized that these two small things were sacrificed in every one of my bad photos!

My biggest obstacle in the quest for good pictures is taking the time to give the picture a chance. When I’m cooking dinner I’m usually rushing around, starving, and trying to eat ASAP. My hands are covered in whatever, there’s something sticky in my bangs, the dog’s begging for scraps at my feet, and I’m afraid to gunk up the camera . . . and so I rush. Rushed photos never look as good as they could have with just a little more time and thought!

To combat this problem, I’ve made some minor adjustments that have already paid off big time:

1. I keep the camera in a specific spot in the kitchen. That way it’s quick to find and easy to reach for in-progress shots.
2. Cook bloggable recipes on the weekends, and do the quick non-blog-worthy stuff on weeknights. My weekend cooking can afford a few extra stops along the way. The weekday cooking? Not so much.
3. Clear off an area in front of the window and keep it clear. Place whatever you’re shooting in that area so you never have to clear off clutter to get to the light.
4. For when light’s not available, get a strong true-spectrum bulb and put it somewhere useful in your kitchen. In my tiny Manhattan kitchen, the stove and main counter are lit by one of these bulbs so that I can easily take a quick in-progress shot with decent light without having to move whatever I’m doing over to the window (granted it’s only 5 steps away but still!). This bulb has drastically changed my in-progress pictures.

The above 4 tips are good for getting you set up to more easily take good photos. But what if you’re not confident in your food-styling skills? Then use my favorite cheat: Extreme closeups! It doesn’t much matter what else is around if you’re showing the texture and color of the food really well and everything else is out of focus.

Look at the picture above, for example. You can vaguely see an out-of-focus bag of coffee in the background, but that’s it. What you can’t see is the stack of recycling and the slow cooker that was also back there, and the cooling rack that was next to the challah board when I took this photo! Those things don’t “read” or even show up in this picture, all that shows is the light (this was taken on my “cleared off” table next to the window) and the texture of the crumb.

If you’re a regular at sites like Tastespotting and Foodgawker, you know I’m far from original in using of the extreme closeup. It seems like even professional magazines have shifted to shooting food using a sort of macro-style, where the main subject is in closeup focus and everything else is out of focus in the background. It turns out this is surprisingly easy to do even with auto-focus turned on: just turn off the flash, stick your camera as close as you can to the food, and try to take a picture. If the camera refuses to shoot the picture because you’re too close, move back until it’ll shoot it. If it focuses on the wrong part, just try it again until you’re happy with the way the picture looks. If your camera, like mine, lets you focus by pressing the button half-way, even better! Just press half-way to focus where you want, then move the camera while holding the button until you have the frame set up right, then press down all the way to take the shot.

Looking for more resources from people who really know what they’re talking about? Here are some of the tutorials and posts that have helped me:

• Apartment Therapy’s Food Photography Tips for Newbies
• 101 Cookbook’s Food Photography Tips
• BlogHer’s Helpful Food Photography Tips from other Bloggers (with lots of links to other resources!)
• Photojojo’s Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips

Got a resource you want to add? Feel free to link to it in the comments!

I’ve been tweaking things all over the blog during the last few days, trying to get everything set up and all the cooking posts trasfered over from Chiagu. I think everything’s going pretty well, but please let me know if you see something weird or broken!

I’ve also been gearing up to start on the BBA Challenge that Pinch My Salt has organized. There are 200 of us participating, and we’ll be working our way through every bread recipe in the inspirational Bread Baker’s Apprentice book. I just got the book today and realized I have a LOT of reading ahead of me! I’m really looking forward to reading all the non-recipe content in this book, I think it’s going to completely revolutionize my bread-baking, and maybe even allow me to come up with my own bread recipes. I’ve been playing with a garlic and herb bread recipe that isn’t quite ready for public use, but I’m sure with this book I’ll be able to finish it!

The first recipe we’re doing in this book is called Anadama and I have the dough rising right now . . . will be sticking it in the fridge to actually bake tomorrow, otherwise I’d be up until 1am making bread!