The Curse of the Food Photo

As part of improving this website I decided that I would love to put up photos of my recipes, because we all know that people really eat with their eyes, and I think that it would make this site a lot better. So I started photographing new recipes whenever I made them (also, whenever I was not so starving that I couldn’t pause to take a picture before shoveling the food into my food-hole). I’ve been working with my tri-pod and different lighting and have even taken some pretty awesome pictures of food that I’ve made. However, it would seem that I am cursed – whenever I take a photo of a food I’m making from a new recipe, I’m then completely disappointed by the recipe and subsequently have no use for the photo because I refuse to post recipes I don’t like.

It started a while back with a recipe for nacho scalloped potatoes – basically a cheesy potato casserole with a Mexican twist. The recipe had definite potential and sounded awesome on the page, but I could only choke the finished product down when I doused my portion with extra cheese, sour cream, tomatoes and green onions. Even then, I still didn’t like it. So, I had a beautiful picture of a delicious-looking dish that fell flat on its face.

Following that, there were disastrous attempts at both eggplant and chicken parmesan, I somehow completely messed up a recipe for ratatouille and had to stop after one bite (and I haven’t been able to eat it since – it was that bad), various other dishes that are not worth the brain space apparently because I know it’s happened more than this but I can’t recall what recipes I tried, and then, most disappointingly, with a recipe for an Asian vegetable noodle soup that used up my bok choi and pea pods from last week’s CSA delivery. I got a gorgeous picture of that one; the soup was beautiful, with carrots, red peppers, pea pods, mushrooms, bok choi, and a hearty-looking broth. We sat down to eat and discovered that the soup had no flavor. Aaron doctored his up with soy sauce, sriracha and salt, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat more than the first bowl.

It seems that I sometimes go in streaks of bad recipes or disastrous attempts at cooking (see last night where I burned potatoes and broccoli and Aaron way overcooked some pork chops), so I hope this isn’t the start of one of those streaks. Especially since I have company coming this weekend and am planning on cooking a couple of meals for them. I’ll keep trying to take pictures, or maybe I’ll just take pictures of recipes that I know I like. However it goes, I hope I can escape this curse sooner than later. I hate spending a ton of time on food to be so disappointed!