A Kate and Guy How To: This Sunday

A few weeks ago Ian and Shelley, of The Farm Cooking School, asked us to teach a little class on food styling and photography. "OK, let's do it!" we said. And suddenly it is happening this Sunday, Dec. 7!

Are we ready? We are now. It's going to be super fun and here's why...  we will look at light and composition, take pictures and talk about pictures. Yum. I could almost survive on this alone, but we'll eat food too. (Ian and Shelley's food is extra delicious.)

Who doesn't love doing that? And you will leave knowing that when it comes to food and photography, less is generally more. The photo on the right is pretty much all we need to make a good picture (plus a camera)!

Join us.

Late-May Mash Up

BE GRATEFUL. That is what we wrote on a piece of paper and taped to our wall last week. It will stay there, as a reminder.

We are happy to have a lot going on (a new studio soon, a new book in the works, a cool smoked fish shoot coming up in June, fun work with Applegate, a tree fort going up in the backyard... all of which we'll post about here in the coming weeks), but staying focused has been hard. So when we sat down at the computer to pull together this blog post, these three images made sense to us in that way that salty and sweet make sense to us in cookies.

1. Elio's birthday is on Sunday. Holy 8! (This pic is from last April, wait till you see him now.)

2. Guy has been crazy trying to start a starter and finally he has trapped yeast in flour and water (it is nice and sour smelling) and, hopefully, will soon be making the dense sprouted bread we so love from our time in Germany and Austria.

3. We love this portrait of Fabrizia, and it reminds us that the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School (where we lived and helped produce the book Coming Home To Sicily) is having its 25th anniversary in June. It is going to be a fantastic celebration (which sadly we will miss) but again serves to remind us of the experience that got us started on our path and yet another reason to be grateful.

So, with that we leave you with these...

Kick-ass ice-cream

Where: The Bent Spoon, Princeton, NJ Who: Gabrielle Carbone and Matt Errico

Why: Its their 10 year Anniversary this week! Go get some ice-cream.

I am not sure if we have mentioned that we used to live in Santa Fe, NM, and Sicily, and New York, and, yes!, in Brooklyn too. But we have landed here in NJ. Many people would, (and do), ask why? It is too long of story to get into but what is important is that we are happy, we are near family and we can get really good, really fresh ingredients that we love to cook with.

Plus we can find other people (like the Bent Spoon people) who also like to make incredibly good things with the best ingredients. Lucky us! And there is none of that Brooklyn hipper-than-thou attitude (we have our own sort of attitude to deal with in Jersey, thank you very much!)

On another note, this portrait of Gabrielle is one of my favorites that I made in the last few months. Sort of Patti Smith meets artisanal ice-cream.

Another cookbook...

worth having. Publishes today! The New Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook, by Ellen Brown. Published by Sterling Epicure.

Photographed by Guy and styled by Kate.

We photographed this book a while ago but still remember many of these delicious recipes. (I think we just made the Irish soda bread in March!)

Here's a sneak peek to get you started.

Check it out online  here...

birthdays

We seem to know a lot of people who have birthdays in early April. Sometimes we get to make them cake. Birthday boy: Gordon

Years around the sun: 28

Cake: Flourless chocolate with a spritz of Meyer lemon zest—why not?—from Canal House Cooks Every Day

Shoot today

And this happened today... a shoot for Applegate Kitchens. Tasty sandwiches.

People Eating: Elio

I like pictures of beautiful food. I like beautiful pictures of food. But what is meant to happen to that food? Hopefully it will be eaten, enjoyed, appreciated; happily. This is something I want to start seeing more of. It should be an interesting challenge because who wants a picture of himself eating? I started with Elio the other day after making these little potato croquettes (Banatages) from the gorgeous and under-appreciated book, Medina Kitchen by Fiona Dunlop. This book focuses on the cooking of North Africa and I hope to cook from it a lot and report back here. So this is my first try with the book and my first try with pics of someone eating (along with beautiful pictures of beautiful food). Fortunately Elio liked these, because that was dinner!

(un)intentional

When Guy and I met, I remember being surprised by a collection of dried-up tea bags tacked up along one wall of his kitchen. A tiny art installation, made of an ordinary thing that I had thrown out thousands of time, turned lovely by focus... One of my favorite food photos that Guy ever took was a Polaroid of two pomegranates that had sat on the windowsill above the sink for too long. They had dried in the New Mexico sun, becoming wizened maracas. But their dusky color stayed true, darkening only a little with age...

Our fridge is always overflowing, so most fruit stays out, surrounding us in bowls and on plates, masquerading as centerpieces. Stuck on shelves near the water glasses. Usually the fruit gets eaten in time, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it gets fed to the chickens, sometimes it gets tossed, and sometimes it keeps sitting there, becoming very old and turning into something completely new.

Outtakes: Applegate

The past few weeks we have been shooting a lot for Applegate. Looking through the library of images we came across many pictures that may never see the light of a computer screen but that we think are interesting and fun: details, trays of ingredients, raw chicken, kooky old animal toys… Sorry, no intellectual or art historical reference this week (I’m sure that’s why you keep reading this blog!). Well, OK, I guess there might be some reference to abstract and found art in here, (Rothko, John Chamberlain) so enjoy.

Working behind the scenes

This is where the text will go... and here it goes... We just finished up a project that involved Kate developing 50 recipes and me photographing them. That was fun, among many other adjectives. But let's try to be more descriptive, as we tell Elio to be instead of just using one word. Let's say it was like that run you dread doing when it is 25 degrees out but when you finish it you are warm and you are happy.

The Farm Dinner at Stockton Market

The season is just starting to turn—the mornings are crisp, the afternoon sun slants a little lower, our slippers are back in rotation—so it was the perfect week for Ian Knauer and Geraldine Campbell to host a harvest dinner at the Stockton Farm Market. Ian, one of Kate’s old cohorts from Gourmet, is hoping to open a cooking school soon, and the dinner was an introduction to all that is good and Ian. We volunteered to help out for the evening (and licked some plates clean behind the scenes). Favorite tastes: Ian’s gorgeous pain d’epi smeared with bacon butter (for real!) and the pure and simple salt-roasted beet puree. On our way out, we nabbed a few hunks of that crusty bread and ate it this morning with homemade Nutella and marmalade. Bring it, autumn!

Grilling for Applegate Farms

Capricious Mother Nature and her sun kept us guessing most of the day, but finally the light was right and we were able to dive into this grilling shoot. An old friend dropped in just as we were finishing up—always a nice way to end the week!

guy kate and elio!