Now that I’m blogging on a regular basis, I’ve dipped a toe in to look at other people’s blogs on related subjects of cooking and am finding it is a very big world out there. Wow, there are a lot of folks who write about the amazing dishes they are churning out and they are taking incredible pictures of it all. Some chronicle the step-by-step process of making dishes, some just have half a dozen pics of the finished product of great meals they’ve prepped or been served at a pop-up-café. In light of this I felt like I wanted to explain, in a tone not at all defensive, that I know you have not seen and you are not going to be seeing a wealth of photographs on meliovore. The photography is not up my alley and I don’t seem to be able to make things look as styled and keylit on the fly as these other impressive folks do, but I’m okay with that.

Besides, in the past weeks when I’ve been thinking about my relationship with picture-taking, or the lack thereof, for the blog and it hasn’t been beautiful plated food that has held an interest for me. I’d be more about showing a darker side of the culinary life, a kitchen counter Weegee of sorts, with this:

Congealed bacon fat captured in what’s left of my favorite butter dish, now known as ‘bacon fat trough’

Or this one I call, “Throw out the bottle on the right.”

But even if these images might be considered an interesting effort by a few, I know they aren’t great works of photographic accomplishment and I don’t plan to travel down this perverse path any further. I hope you, my reading partners, will not feel cheated by the lack of illustrations here. Sometimes the food I put on the table looks really nice, sometimes not, but going forward I think I’ll just eat it when it’s hot. For independent blog pics of great looking food I direct you to these other bloggers I’ve come across who live in NY, Stockton and London respectively, The Spamwise Chronicles, Evil Chef Mom and The Food I Eat, each of whom also has a blog roll of other great food blogs. And I say again, there is no sour grapes or implied criticism here about what they are producing, I can always visit their pics in my spare time and rationalize that perhaps their proliferation of food porn takes the pressure off me.

Besides, the few times my daughter has found me taking pictures of things, like sliced kohlrabi, or some grilled meat after I glazed it, she has been fairly incensed. I’m not typically put off by her finding some of my independent activities absurd or offensive, she is at that pre-teen age. But in this case, I think she may actually be echoing the voice inside my head that suspects the activity as, for me, tipping over onto the stupid side of the scale. But while I am on the subject of stupidity and trial and error, I also want to say that when I am offering advice and strategy tips, I do so from a position of someone who is still figuring things out as she goes along and has made probably every technical mistake in the kitchen at least once. I continue to burn crusts and curdle cream sauces and sometimes serve it anyway. And I was, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, shaking that brown, decrepit, over-the-hill Cholula into my home made guacamole. But then if you keep your eyes and mind open – hmm, all the bottles of Cholula in the store are bright red not brown – you’ll live and learn, figure out whatmakes you hum and just keep doing better. That’s my hope.