use real butter

Recipe: buddha’s hand citron vodka

Our “wake up earlier” project works quite well. I’m sitting down and working before 7am each morning, although with everything I have on my plate it’s never early enough. Damn you, Sleep!! I was able to catch Andrew on Monday before he slipped off to Austin for SXSW. We went to Nick and Willy’s in Boulder for some slow-roasted chicken. That is some gooooood chicken. If you haven’t tried it, you really ought to. After that, we set to work on some items for the photography workshop. Whenever it feels like the organization and planning is bogging me down, I talk to Andrew and he gets me jazzed up again. Fan-freaking-tastic!

andrew advises

I finally culled my 2000+ photos from the Sandhill crane shoot (two words: marathon session) and have a few more to share before we move on to other fun and exciting things. I’m not posting all of them, that would be insanity… and boring.

despite what it looks like, it was quite windy and cold

Sarah had asked in the comments how I go about choosing the keepers when I have culled out the technically inferior photographs (unfocused, bad compo, etc.). That’s an excellent question. I think part of what makes a good photographer is knowing what not to show and that requires having artistic standards. I remove my personal emotional attachment to captures and try to be as objective as possible. And I am a pretty hard critic of my own work (and of other people’s work, but I keep those thoughts to myself).

gotta look nice for the ladies

I threw pottery for ten years. When I was first learning to throw, my instructor (an incredibly talented artist) pulled one of his beautiful bowls from the kiln. Stu scrunched his nose at it and threw it in the trash. “What are you doing?!” I exclaimed as I ran to retrieve it from the trash bin. He told me it wasn’t good enough, not up to his standards. “Well, it’s up to mine, I’ll take it – don’t throw it out, Stuuuuuu,” I pleaded. He shook his head, gently took the bowl from my hands, and smashed it on the ground. “If it has my name on it,” he smiled “then it has to be up to snuff.” I thought he was crazy then. I get it now.

To answer Sarah’s question: I don’t delete good or great photos. I keep them in archive. The ones that I show – sometimes less than 1% or up to 10% – are the best ones of the bunch. If I have 5 photos of the exact same thing, then I’m doing something wrong, because that is not how I shoot. Usually I will have a series that varies the depth-of-field, exposure time, focal length, composition, or action. If all is technically solid, then choosing the best one boils down to my artistic judgment. I think a lot of photography enthusiasts overlook the importance of being selective. Loving your photograph is not going to make it any better or any more appealing to an objective viewer.

lots of shenanigans (the top one is tossing dead plant material in the air)

About a month ago, I was breezing through the Boulder Whole Foods store when I stopped at the produce section where they harbor exotic things like prickly pears, passion fruits, and spiky round orange things. What caught my attention was a Buddha’s hand citron. I knew about these because I had seen Todd and Diane post about it on their blog. What I didn’t know was how the fragrance would mesmerize me into purchasing two of them without having the slightest clue what I would do with them.

the hand of flavor

they are reminiscent of some sea critters

**Jump for more butter**

Hey, how was your weekend? Did you do anything fun? Get work done? Sleep in? Enjoy the weather? Learn something new?

I did all of that and more except for the sleeping in part (of course). A few weeks ago, Jason invited me and others along for a photo road trip down to the San Luis Valley to catch the Sandhill Crane migration. As an extra (and boy do I mean extra) bonus, we brought lenses provided by Pro Photo Rental (one of our sponsors for the food photography workshop in June!) like the Nikon 200-400mm f4 and the Nikon 500mm f4. We had similarly intimidating and amazing lenses for the Canon shooters (Stepan and his dad Oleg). So none – NONE – of my fellow photog pals were able to come! That’s really too bad because they missed out on stuff like this:

sunset over the sangre de cristo mountains and the great sand dunes (at base of mountains)

a pair of sandhill cranes squaring off

The trip wasn’t all rainbows and lollipops. It’s work. We woke up at 4:30 am (the guys got up at 5am) to scope out and shoot before morning twilight. We stood in 4°F temperatures for hours waiting for the sun, waiting for the birds, waiting… There is no running around to warm yourself up – you’ll scare all the birds away! I probably sent about 2 dozen flying off prematurely as I took 10 minutes to slowly walk 20 feet in the snow toward my setup point. Did I mention that I can’t operate my camera with gloved fingers and that the bodies and lenses are all metal – in 4°F weather? And then there was the bland Mexican food. Seriously, we weren’t that far from the border with New Mexico, but yeah – something is fundamentally flawed with the Mexican food in Colorado.

jason looks on as the sun lights up the distant mountains

flying to feed in the rye fields at sunrise

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: big bob gibson’s barbecue ribs

**Warning** It’s a long post, but there IS a recipe at the end.

The road to knowledge has never been so fun. My teaser from a few weeks ago was a quick glimpse into the Rigorous Studies that I and several food bloggers/writers endured in California. Kingsford University’s 3-day program took us from Oakland to Healdsburg for a thorough study in buttermilk fried chicken, charcoal, slow cooked pork insanity ecstasy, Zinfandel, spice rubs, and grilled pizza. As with any university experience, the journey with your classmates and what you learn from them is just as important as the knowledge gained. So let me hit upon the highlights or else we’ll be here all day and all night!

Orientation: Everyone boarded the bus outside The Claremont Hotel and rode to Picán for an evening that started with a cocktail and hors d’oeuvres mixer on the patio. I was quite delighted in the parade of pecan and hickory smoked pork ribs, country ham and cheddar hushpuppies, chicken liver pâté and chow chow herbed biscuits, and Louisiana crab toasts because I had eaten one crunchy taco all day in my rush to the Denver Airport. [And thus my dirty little secret was revealed to my fellow food buffs: Jen ate Taco Bell Hell.]

i had never dined in oakland before

these biscuits were morsels of tender, melty wonderment

Eventually we were encouraged to mosey into the private dining room where Diane and I immediately scoped out the best seats for shooting – toward the back and against the wall. Priorities, kids. There was much conversation, much shooting of food porn, and of course heaps of phenomenal food. We were welcomed by Drew McGowan of The Clorox Company (parent company of Kingsford), Chef Dean Dupuis, and pitmaster Chris Lilly.

drew and dean introduce themselves and oakland to the group

first course: famous buttermilk fried chicken

first course: choice of shrimp and grits or southern caesar (this was diane’s shrimp and grits)

entrées: choice of grilled berkshire pork shoulder (that’s what i chose)

or grilled loch duarte salmon (what jen selected)

dessert: pear upside down cake

chris talks with picán’s fabulous event manager, miriam

On the bus ride back to the hotel, Chris Lilly sat next to me. I love Chris Lilly. He immediately struck me as a warm, friendly, and down-to-Earth kinda guy. Pitmaster. Wait a second, make that ten time world champion pitmaster and executive chef of Big Bob Gibson’s Bar-B-Q. What does that title say to you? It says “badass” to me. He is the Yoda of barbecue, but he didn’t make us do handstands while sitting on our feet as we tried to levitate the X-wing fighter out of the swamp. Chris was a far kinder master and had Luke been hanging out with Chris instead of Yoda, he wouldn’t have complained about the food… not a peep.

Charcoal 101: The next morning, I managed to wake up early enough to squeak in a workout (after wandering about the grounds of the Claremont in search of the fitness facilities) before we had to load up onto the bus and head over to The Clorox Tech Center where we were greeted with breakfast before sitting down for presentations given by the Kingsford research and development team and an unveiling of their latest product. Our group wasn’t shy at all and many of us piped up with questions, engaged in good discussion with the Kingsford folks as well as with Chris (he’s not a pitmaster for nothing, kids). I’m a gas griller for many reasons the main one being fear of burning down the state of Colorado. My fear has always been rooted in ignorance – my ignorance of how to grill using charcoal properly. Every minute I learned about charcoal at a more fundamental level (think engineering and physics) and in terms of what cooks are looking for, the more comfortable I was with the idea of charcoal grilling.

i dig the lectures

chris discusses what he looks for in charcoal performance

**Jump for more butter**