Cooking, Eating, and Taking Pictures

Compared to last year, the past two months have been very different in a lot of ways - primarily because Jane is here in Kenya with me! Apart from the fact that communication is much easier from a mile away than from 8000, Jane's presence means that I eat a lot better than I did. My life right now includes a whole lot less Hamburger Helper and a whole lot more gourmet, delicious, meals with more than two or three ingredients. We all know that Jane is a great cook, so being here in Africa with limited ingredients and a distinct lack of Trader Joes has created a challenge for her - what can she come up with each weekend to make out of what's available? With any challenge, you have to have someone to judge the results, and that's where I will gladly volunteer my eating skills!

All this cooking has brought along with it an interest in "food blogging." The concept is pretty self-explanatory, but I learned that a big part of food blogging is providing great pictures to go along with the recipes and stories that the blogger posts. Cue the teamwork music! I've developed a bigger and bigger interest in photography over the past year, so now I have something to do while Jane cooks. Hopefully, this combination will produce some blog posts from Jane that are not only educational in their cooking instruction, but are also mouth-watering in their aesthetic appeal.

We gave all this a trial run this weekend on a few different recipes - one for homemade bagels (definitely didn't have those last year) and one for chicken/vegetable rosemary shish-ka-bobs (nope, none of those either). I was pretty much just a photographer for the bagels, but I did get to do the grilling on the shish-ka-bobs, which makes me feel useful! We rode into Kim Pace's house in Nairobi on Saturday for a cookout, and I feel very confident that Jane's creation was the envy of everyone eating plain old beef or chicken breasts.

These pictures are the start of my food-photography exploration...hopefully they will get better with time, and this is one case where my stomach will be advocating as much practice as possible!