Cooking and Food Pornography Photography

There is some real food porn on the internet. I tell you. Sometimes I drool even. Sometimes, it’s actually too much. You know what I’m talking about; I don’t really need to tell you, huh?

After looking at all of those amazing food and cooking blogs, I thought, okay, well even if my pictures suck, there’s only one way to get better. So I’ve been getting into taking photos with my iphone camera when I cook. I checked out this nifty tutorial which got me using the “adjust” feature in the iphoto editing program. It’s pretty easy, even for a non-techie like me!

Last night I made what I’m going to call “Polenta Pizza Pie.” I used this recipe (thanks budgetbytes), added a couple of mild Italian sausages, fresh spinach instead of frozen, and a ton of basil which I had dried myself (it’s more flavorful than dried, but less flavorful than fresh). I used Dutch Goat Cheese (since I’m not eating Bovine Dairy these days).  It turned out great and FH was really happy.

My photo styling and photo editing need some work, but practice will make perfect, or at least closer to it!

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What do you think?

Fermenting

Fermenting

Well, one thing I’m getting into is lacto-fermenting foods.  Here’s a pic of some garlic and red onions, and some cucumber pickles.  It’s very good for one’s tummy to get some of those probiotic bacteria in there.  And it doesn’t taste too bad.  Helps the digestion.  They say a happy belly leads to a happy mind, the gut being the second brain and all that.  Anyway, I recommend it.  I still haven’t gotten very good results with  my water kefir grains, but hopefully soon.

But really, fermenting myself is what I’m doing.  I realized I haven’t written much because I am just kind of treading water or floating or…something.  I’ve been having a midlife crisis since like third grade, so now that I’m actually…da da da dum…forty seven years old, I think I might be having a midlife crisis for real, but I don’t know how it’s so different from every other time in my life.

I’ve always wondered if I were doing the right thing, in the right place, woke up in a parallel universe where everything is just harder.  And I’ve learned to calm those worries by saying to myself, “everything happens for a reason” and “you’re right where you need to be.”

I took a part-time job working with autistic kids and the company is new so things are kind of flippety-floppety in terms of training and other administrative stuff.  It bugs me.  It’s also hard work–I have four clients–funny calling little kids clients, huh? Well, they are really great except when they are melting down and I don’t know what to do.  But I’m just trying to be okay with that.  I want to be able to say, “I love it!  this is my next career.  I’m no longer lost or confused.  I’m focused, ambitious, on a path.”  But I can’t say that. I just don’t know. Sometimes I just want to stay home and do nothing and sometimes I really like the job.  I don’t trust myself to even know what I want to do.  I want my husband to get really rich so I can live off of him!! Haha though, I don’t know if I’d ever be able to do that.  As a little girl in the women’s movement of the 1970s I committed to being independent fully forever.  No one was going to have me under his thumb like all the grown women I knew.  This is a truth that is way deep for me.  I don’t know if it’s true.  Maybe it’s false and just another tentacle of the “don’t ever trust anyone ever” monster that lurks in my subconscious mind.  I don’t know.  Anyway, he probably won’t get rich enough to support both of us in the lavish fermented foods style we’ve grown accustomed to anyway.

So…I am fermenting.  Trying not to worry about money.  Not to work more hours just for money.  Not to worry about financial dependency.  Trusting that I will know what to do next whenever next gets here.

I keep forgetting that I had to quit my more than full-time teaching career because of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and that what I am fermenting, is a new life where I stress less and have fewer symptoms of exhaustion and pain.  This is what’s in my jar.  I can wait for it.