My brother and I both love to take photographs of food. I thought everyone did until someone pointed out to me that they thought we were rather unusual in this. Really? Well, considering the fact that most of my fun memories are centered around food and occasions when we've been gathered to eat food, I think it is the most normal thing in the world.
When I photograph a dish, I'm able to immediately conjure up what I was doing when I ate that particular food. For example, our family has a tradition of making "Monkey Balls", a gooey caramelized pull-apart sticky roll concoction, for Christmas morning and New Year's morning. When I look at this picture, I relive all the good-natured banter we sling back and forth as we fight to see who will get the pieces covered in the gooiest caramel.
A picture of peanut butter pies reminds me of all the pies I've made in my quest for the perfect peanut butter pie. Yum, I can almost taste the filling just looking at that picture.
There is no one who loves frosting more than me but it has to be the RIGHT kind of frosting. Whipped topping is NOT what I'm after. I want the good old lard-based frosting. When my birthday rolls around these days, I make sure that I go out and buy my own cake so I can be assured that I get the type of cake that I want. The more decoration it has on it, the more frosting I get to eat along with my cake. Heavenly!
When I tried a new decorating technique with pastry crust to cover a fruit pie, I documented my success with a picture. It may be 85 degrees outside today but when I look at that picture, I can smell the hot apple pie coming out of the oven and hear the laughter of my family as we gather around the table to play cards and eat hot pie with vanilla ice cream on top.
The Commander's birthday? Oh yes, sirloin and grilled shrimp with some garlic mashed potatoes on the side. He made short work of that meal.
I'm more of a BBQ Beef girl myself. I like to serve it open-face on a bun. That way I get extra meat and sauce without the "unnecessary calories" of extra bread. Ah, my mouth is puckering remember the taste of those early-summer strawberries that I enjoyed with this meal.
One of my favorite pictures is this one, taken in a Starbucks shop in Bandung, Indonesia. It felt wonderful to take a short break from an unfamiliar culture to just sink into a comfortable chair, order a frosty mocha drink and THEN, to enjoy an unexpected treat of free donuts. I don't know what my son was working on, but we sat there with our computers for several hours while I ate free donuts, drank more mocha drinks and worked on my blog from thousands of miles from home. Abercrombie!
If you haven't tried photographing your memorable meals or dishes, give it a try! I'd suggest that you try taking the pictures using natural light and go for unusual angles. Don't be afraid to get in close. If you have a photo editing program, you can try different croppings (saving your original photograph, as well as the cropped images). You can get quite a few different looks from just one photo. Then sit back and enjoy those memories for years to come without one worry in the world about indulging in too many calories. Your photos are entirely fat-free!
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