I was interviewed the other day on the phone and the journalist asked me if I had any tips for any potential bloggers. One of the best pieces of advice I can give is to make use of the medium as much as possible. The advantage for blogs unlike print mediums is that we can lavish photo after photo on our pages. And because of that food photography is really important and honing your skills with photography is really important. I won’t ever claim to be a great photographer, I think I merely do a passable job and most of my experience is learnt through trial and error. And because of that I can always learn more.

Dario Milano

When Mr NQN and I were offered places at Dario Milano’s food photography class we both jumped at it. Neither of us have taken a class in photography but we are both very keen to hone our skills in the area and we wanted to learn from a working photographer with a great portfolio. And food photography is such a specific genre of photography. After all you have to convey the subject and make it look attractive but you have to make it look edible above all else.

At his studio in Waterloo, Dario showed us all sorts of things-he has a slew of interesting props including these wooden boards that simulate tables which he had made up for him and he also told us some great places to rent props from. Most importantly he showed us how to make the most of the manual settings of the camera and photograph things with a softbox and external flash (something Mr NQN has been trying to show me what to do).

It was a four hour class with the second half of the class concentrating on food styling and he showed us interesting tips like how to make a glass of white wine using a tiny drop of yellow liquid food colouring (and here I was opening up an actual bottle of wine!). If you are interested, have a look at his site FoodPixels for the next workshop class.

The photographed, uncropped and untouched photo that I took at the class

The class inspired me to keep taking photos and experiment with things. After all I have four stunning lenses from my fantastic sponsors at Sigma that I am completely in love with and I need to utilise them to their full capability. Dario in particular loved the Sigma macro lens and says that it is one of the best and best value lenses on the market.

This omelette was the first thing I photographed after the class. I knew it was the perfect item to do-well not because it was an omelette and Dario showed us how to photograph one, but rather because it was served on a black plate which is what I often have trouble with-chocolate cakes are another item I find hard to photograph. I know that I need to keep playing with it and that is just half the fun!

Photo taken on automatic setting-the black plate throws the camera off and makes the omelette too light a shade

Photo taken on too dark a manual setting

Could use improvement but a better manual setting

Oh and the omelette? Well it’s so easy and I think the longest you’ll wait is for your pan to heat up. The enoki mushrooms give the omelette a meaty but not tough texture and the green onions and oyster sauce and sesame round out the flavour. It is for those nights where you want a nutritious, healthy meal but don’t have the time nor inclination to order takeaway or slave over the stove.

So tell me Dear Reader, what sort of photography interests you? Food? Fashion? Nature?

5 Minute Enoki Mushroom & Onion Omelette

Serves 2

• 1 tablepoon oil for frying
• 5 free range eggs
• 200g packet of enoki mushrooms
• 1/3 cup chopped scallions/green spring onion/shallots
• A little chilli (optional)
• Oyster sauce and sesame oil to drizzle over at end

1. Heat your pan on a medium heat. Whisk eggs in a bowl and cut the bottoms off the enoki mushrooms and then cut the rest of the enoki mushrooms into inch long pieces.  Heat some oil in the pan and add the eggs and then sprinkle over the enoki mushrooms distributing them evenly. Then scatter over some of the sliced green onions on top, add lid on top and cook until cooked-you can flip this over carefully to cook the other side too.

2. Scatter some finely sliced chilli (large red ones are less hot), drizzle with some oyster sauce and sesame oil as well as extra green onions. I added some coriander just because I had some.

So there I was, waiting for a batch of blood for my annual Halloween party. Not the human kind mind you, but nevertheless a batch of blood. The only problem? It was about to arrive when I was going to have a meeting with my book publishers at Penguin to discuss publicity for my upcoming book.

“What am I going to do?” I asked Mr NQN. “It needs to be fresh, and I can’t pick it up any other time”

“Bring it with you to the meeting?” he suggested.

“I suppose, I can’t be the only author that has brought a bag of blood to a meeting, can I?” I reasoned.

Well as it turns out, blood isn’t the easiest thing to get and it ended up being late which saved me from a fate of explaining why I was carry half a litre of cryovaced pigs’s blood (well at least it wasn’t in a bucket and I wasn’t in a 70′s style prom dress I didn’t have said bucket tipped over me a la Carrie…).

Every year I look forward to my favourite time of the year, Halloween where I get to say goodbye to the pretty and embrace the ghoulishly morbid. This year for Halloween I ended up making 14 items – I know 13 is a lucky or unlucky number depending on who you talk to but an additional thing just slipped in in my excitement. I prepped the party for the week prior to it-I was holding it early as I wasn’t able to hold it on the last weekend of October and I also figured if anyone wanted to cook the recipes they would have time in order to make them. As I have for the past few years, I went to my favourite party supply store The Party People for items including a backdrop that would transform our neutral toned apartment into a dungeon and for good measure I hired a fog machine so that guests could be treated to the sight of a foggy, misty Halloween evening! I do love the delightfully creepy!

A few days before the party I sent around a little reminder to my guests:

“My dearest, darling ghoul
I’ve been busy mixing up spiders and gruel
For a Halloween night
That will give you a fright
See you on Saturday at 7pm, don’t forget there’s only one rule…

Please wear a costume! ”

Well I never laid claim to any poetic talents. So without any further dithering allow me, dressed as your Disneyland Haunted Mansion Maid wearing a costume made by my mother, to present you with my hellishly horrible Halloween party of 2011!

Press the doorbell to enter…

Blood punch

My esteemed guests, let us start with something to drink. Some blood punch Madam or Sir? Presented most delightfully in a clear blood fountain, the mistress of the manor likes to drink blood so she thought you might like to try some. Perhaps you’ll get a taste for it like she has…

Please help yourself to anything on the dining table…it’s all gruesomely edible…

Have you ever visited  a pet cemetery? Here is a haunted one made of an avocado, spinach and chickpea hummus dip where ghosts abound visiting tombstone crackers and pretzel fences keep them in.

If you haven’t visited a dentist lately I wouldn’t recommend these apple rotting teeth with caramel peanuts…

Watermelon brain

This was the brain of someone that displeased the mansion’s mistress. She’s a little despotic so she decided off with his head and that she would share it with all of you…

Oh dear, and here is the rest of the man that displeased the mansion mistress. Apart from being a despot she also has a nicer side and believes in nose to tail eating…So she thought that we should eat all of him from his bbq pork ribs to his spicy sausage intestines! With a bloody tomato sauce of course

Smokey pumpkin cheese ball

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“Turn left!!” I tell my father from the back seat watching in horror as he turns right into the cross city tunnel taking us in the opposite direction that we want to. We are running late for our date with Chef Kumar the chef and owner of Aki’s and Abhi’s Indian restaurants. He is going to show my mother and I how to make a curry paste from scratch-or so we thought…

Escaping the tunnel and arriving at Aki’s breathless and panting we meet Kumar. “Cooking has to come from here (points to heart) and not here (points to his head)” says Kumar Mahadevan, chef and owner. Aki’s has just been given its first chef’s hat in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Awards and is the only hatted Indian restaurant in Australia while Abhi’s, well that remains a perennial Inner West favourite packed every night including Monday nights.

I must admit that I don’t often make Indian food at home as I want to stay away from using bottled pastes and sauces as much as possible and yet I don’t often have the recipes to make my spice pastes from scratch. I invited my mother along as she is a keen curry maker so I knew that she would be interested in this.

Which brings me to my next point “I don’t believe in spice pastes” Kumar says. I look around. Hmm okay, I have come for a lesson on how to make my own Indian spice pastes and he doesn’t believe in them? He explains further that most spice pastes are meant for convenience but at his two restaurants, each sauce is made from scratch using different flavour combinations. Unlike say French cuisine where there are five master sauces, Indian cuisine has a multitude of different sauces and even within a huge country such as India, people find themselves as strangers to the cuisine from another area.

South Indian cuisine tends to be  lighter, more watery and spicier whereas North Indian cuisine tends to be richer, creamier with more cream, butter and nut sauces. He explains the origin of the very popular butter chicken. It originated 60-70 years ago in Delhi where a chef had some leftover Tandoori chicken. He made a tomato, butter, cream and garlic sauce and that’s how we find ourselves with butter chicken. And check out this vat of butter chicken sauce being made. That’s a lot of butter (or buttah!). And Kumar tells us that the best results are achieved with a tandoor oven as that imparts a smokiness to the chicken that is hard to replicate at home.

A pot of butter chicken sauce-now that’s a lot of butter!

But now onto the recipes. Today we are making my favourite curry a palak paneer. How long will it take? Once the mise en place is prepared, just 15 minutes. Palak Paneer is a delicious and very healthy curry made up of a spinach puree with cubes of Indian cottage cheese.

The spice drawer

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