photography | The Garum Factory

Never schedule a photo shoot with your wife for the day after she disassembles and packs her Seven road bike for a trip. Not unless you want dessert sharing the frame with epidermal roadkill. A Photoshop alchemist might be able to redeem the damage, but my skills are more 4th-grade pick-a-card-any-card than digital wizard. If you catch a gouged finger–and there are ten of them in this post–or a bashed nail, you know why. But no matter–spring is here. Somewhere people are riding bicycles. Tufted titmice are peter-peter-peter-ing. And if this morning you woke up to a dusting of snow, as we did in Boston, you can still make yourself a sweet-tart dessert with a concentrated essence of Spring in it, Lemon-Rhubarb Custard Soufflé. And a great dessert it is, with two kinds of tartness, and 3 different textures, even if the hands that made it look a bit worse for the wear.

Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. That’s the way it was with Warm Radish Salad with Bacon and Pea Tips. Salad is a killer to photograph. Light glints off the dressed surfaces, producing bits of glare or “hot spots.” And if the salad is one part greens and another part something else, then while it may taste delicious to toss everything together, that homestyle approach doesn’t make for an alluring photo. The heavier components tend to weigh down the more delicate ones. What’s a guy with a camera and a chef for a wife to do?

Make the damn salad and photograph it a second time, that’s what.* The salad above is composed with a photograph, or dinner guests, in mind–radishes here, salad there, easy on the dressing. The photo shot from straight down later in the post is the way we’d normally eat the salad in all its messy collapsed glory. Different stees.

You choose.