What’s up this summer in the kitchen

A lot has happened since the last post. Had a poster presentation and an oral presentation for my final year project. Finished and handed in my dissertation. Immediately went away on a most English beach holiday. Came back.

Oh yes, I’m on my summer break now. It shall be the last holiday before I properly “grow up” and lead an “adult working life”. Except that I’ve not actually got a job yet, but all in good time.

One of my summer projects shall be to cook up a storm in the kitchen and document the process with photos. The kitchen experiment was an inspired idea from my housemate and fellow food partner-in-crime. We have quite different strengths in the kitchen, but our food tastes mostly agree and we both don’t in the least mind experimenting with foods. I quite look forward to this, though it will be quite a feat to organise and continually come up with something worthy of documenting.

I’ve been reading up on food photography and playing around with ways and places to photograph food within the house. And I’ve come to realise why the photos of food I took in my room generally looked nicer than those taken in other places, and it was because of the gauzy day curtains in my room that diffused the sunlight giving the food this soft natural light which just made food in general not look as if it was overly greasy. Thankfully it’s summer and I don’t have to think too much about artificial lighting because even at 8pm which is past normal dinner prep time, it’s still bright.

I think I outdid myself yesterday. I woke up and one of the first things I remember thinking when I was half-awake and still refusing to get out of bed was that I had to finish up my overly ripe pears and a crumble sounded like a lovely idea. Then, I set about preparing the pear filling and while that was on the hob, made the crumble topping. There is something I find that I rather like about crumbles, it’s that you can feel your way about it. Like I can just go about adjusting the ratios of flour to butter to sugar for the crumble till it gets that right texture that I can’t do with cake mixtures.

And then once that was in the oven, I got about making lunch. Which I even then had time to photograph, because I thought the fried egg turned out beautifully this time, which isn’t always the case when I fry eggs.

Okay you’ll see what I mean about what I mean about the glistening of the food photos that are not taken in my room, this was taken in the living room, which is where our dining table is, student house as it is. Love how the egg yolk looks here, makes me just want to pop it and watch the runny yolk ooze out.

So that’s that photo, unedited. Could have done with some editing, but I really can’t be bothered. Compare it with this photo of biryani rice that was made some weeks ago.

See how there is this softness about the light when the photo is taken in my room? Well I think it makes a difference. Instantly looks better.

Ok, so I was saying I outdid myself because later on that day, I was thinking of what not boring thing to have for dinner. And since I had quite a bit of milk to finish before its expiry date, I thought of making a roux. So, I put some butter in the pan, lots of garlic and paprika, fried some white fish fillet and flaked it up in the process, added flour, then I turned down the heat and added milk and stirred and it just developed into a glorious sauce. Seasoned that with salt and freshly ground pepper and had it with tagliatelle. Would have loved if I had tomatoes at hand, and perhaps roasted flaked almonds or some nutty earthy element. As it was, I had carrots just because I had to have some sort of vegetable and there wasn’t much vegetables in my fridge.

I’m looking forward to the kitchen experiments, perhaps we’ll even invite some daring people over to try them as well, haha! Meanwhile, I’m anticipating the coming of summer fruits! Cannot wait to make my first jam of the year =D.

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