Food photography & the fake never melting Ice cream – Scallops with fennel
If you are into reading food blogs or are a food blogger you might have noticed all the great food blogs with awesome photos, a truly well composed and uber stylish. That is a full time job my friend.
I can tell you that when I make a little effort into taking a little bit nicer photo it takes time and usually I have people sitting down and waiting to eat when I start this photo shooting nonsense. I don´t want to keep people waiting or eat my food cold so usually my photos are just a snap shot. Like the one below. It was an awesome dish and the photo could be more stylish, I knooooow. I could have sprayed some hair spray over it to make more shiny….but I didn´t because I was so eager to try this dish of mine. I do make food and eat it, I don´t cook for photo shoots.
BUT…I came a cross a blog about food photography and styling and they have all kind of trick about making food look good. And there I saw that sometimes what you see is not what you think it is, like they have a trick for the never melting ice cream, hmmm, ice cream that never melts…. exactly, it´s not an ice cream but it sure does look like one tasty bowl of vanilla ice.
So maybe I can go find something that looks like scallops and creamy sauce and make this dish again to get a better shot 😀
Since this hobby of mine is about cooking and eating I will relax on the shooting, believe me…it´s a pressure out there to have nice shots. I can´t take the pressure…joke… I will make my best but I will also be eating after I shoot, a WARM meal.
My melted Ice cream, I have a lot to learn about food photography …just kidding.
This is a chocolate Ganache, but now I am learning. I could use this picture for a delicious brown sauce with meat balls or maybe Black bean soup or melted chocolate ice cream. (smiley).
We did have some food in the kitchen the other day, little bit of this, little of that…but nothing was planned for dinner. In stead of buying what we thought we might need we cooked from what we had. That is always so much fun.
I made one dish and my boyfriend one, first me then him. We call it Foodwaves when we cook like this. We made a huge concept about Foodwaves with Manifesto and all. I will tell you all about Foodwaves next time.
Here is my photo of this super awesome dish. No studio lights or nice props (or hair spray), just solid good old scallops
and slightly over exposed…
Scallops with fennel for two
- 4 Scallops
- 1/2 bulp of Fennel
- 2-4 cloves garlic
- Lemon, juice of 1/2 lemon
- Salt, a pinch
- Pepper, litlle bit
- Orange juice, a splash (that fits in a shot glass)
- Cream, a double splash
- Cucumber, 1/2 cup, finely diced
- Basil
- Organic chicken stock, a dash.
- olive oil
I didn´t mesure any ingredients, just made it by feeling. I will try to be as accurate in the recipe as I can, but with those ingredients it´s hard to make something bad.
Slice up fennel, use half of it now and half later. Dice the cucumber. Mix well and set a side. This is the fresh salad under the scallops, a mixture of cucumber and fresh fennel.
Fry the rest of the fennel with garlic and then add lemon juice and a little bit of fresh good orange juice and chicken stock. Salt and pepper. Little bit of cream and fresh basil.
On a skillet with little bit of olive oil, fry the scallops. Before frying make sure they are patted dry and sprinkle with salt and pepper. You only need to cook the scallops for couple of minutes, about one – two minutes each side. Be sure it´s warm all the way trough, but don´t over cook it.
Put the salad on the plate, then the scallops on top and pour over the fennel cream sauce. Garnish with fresh basil. Serve right a way.
With only 2 scallops each this is just a tiny starter.
The house by the sea foodwaves 