A Funny Thing Happened on the way to today’s post

A funny thing happened today while working on my blog. OK, several funny things, and if you don’t realize it yet, I pretty much will share anything. So here goes…

As a newly minted food blogger, a Hectic Dad of eight kids, an amateur photographer, as well as one of the worst housekeepers in the world (especially in the kitchen)…you would think that I would not be making discoveries about my skills, kitchen, and the like at this point. I had anticipated that having a new kitchen blog would have challenges, but I didn’t really think through all the different issues that might arise. I’m officed out  of the home, and right now I’m the only one working on this blog full-time. I’m trying to get some help for content creation from several people, but this is such a new project that actual content hasn’t yet materialized.

The photos you see on the site…I took them. The awful prose you’re reading…mine. The recipes are pretty much of my own creation or adaptation (attributed to an original source if I can find it). All the oopsies, errors, omissions, and snafus start with me…and end with me.

So this morning I realized that I needed to make the Turkey Carcass Soup that I had planned to make from Thanksgiving’s 24-pound turkey. Piece of cake. I’ve made this soup a gazillion times. “Just follow the recipe”, I said. “It’s easy”, I said. “The only difference is you’re going to blog about it”, I said.

Please stop laughing. I really anticipated that this was going to be that easy. What could go wrong? It’s just soup.

Then I had the added idea that maybe I should concentrate on writing about the gadgets that make the process of this soup’s creation easier. The first one that came to mind was the Progressive International GPC-4000 Fruit and Vegetable Chopper, because if there is one gadget that saves time..this would be the one I’d pick. You can read about it in the actual post…

Time to start hunting for the chopper. We have a fairly large kitchen, I have eight kids (four of whom are home at the moment, but six were here for Thanksgiving), a wife, and lots and lots of cabinets. If I had my way, I would label each item and it would have a singular, unique place in the cabinets. I would probably print a label to ensure proper stowage. I continually tell myself it’s not being OCD, it’s being efficient.

But this is the Hectic Household and I have a Hectic Kitchen. So we’re pretty much lucky if the items that are washed either by hand or in the dishwasher are put away before they are used again. And with lots of people stowing lots of items, things move around a lot. There are time that I wonder whether my kitchen gadgetry comes to life when we’re all sleeping and has a secret life, like the playthings in Toy Story.

So the turkey carcass and ingredients waited patiently on the counter while I rummaged through cabinet after cabinet. You know that situation where you are absolutely certain that an item is supposed to be in one place and it’s not. Yeah, that was me. I kept opening the same stupid cabinet, saw the chopper wasn’t there, opened another cabinet, rummaged around, and then went back to the I know it’s in here cabinet.

Funny thing was, the chopper was in there. You see, the chopper has this really cool opaque storage box. Who would have thought that somebody actually put the chopper and it’s parts back in it’s very own storage box? And what idiot hadn’t put a label on the outside of the storage box? Well, at least it has a label now! Because I’m the idiot who didn’t have one there in the first place.

So I got out the chopper and grabbed my DSLR camera and decided to take photographs before I used the chopper. If only it was that easy. After 30 minutes of scrubbing the counters, I still couldn’t get a balance between “clean” and “not glaring to blind you”. There has to be a trick with Corian counters, but I’m not sure what it is.

Then the lighting became a problem. You see, I’m trying to save the environment one lightbulb at a time. Actually, that’s not it at all. I hate changing light bulbs and I’m really, really cheap (I’d love to say “frugal”, but I’m not that uppity). Any light bulb that doesn’t need constant changing and/or can save me money gets my attention. Verilux managed to get my attention, and last year I ordered Verilux Natural Spectrum Daylight compact fluorescent light bulbs. I ordered natural spectrum bulbs because our kitchen always looked yellow to me and the natural light bulbs from the hardware store were burning out way too fast. These bulbs are supposed to last 10,000 hours! I wouldn’t have to change a light bulb again, I’d have natural light, and because they are CF we would save money. It never dawned on me that my camera would get confused with a mixture of CF, natural, and incandescent lights coming from different parts of the house. After a series of photos with and without flash, with shadows, with weird coloring, and with a bit of cursing…I finally went to all manual mode on the camera and got a decent shot of the chopper. Look to the right, I’m not joking, it’s a decent representation of the product. Of course, the “before” picture is going to look decent. It took some work but I got it captured on digital film.

But as soon as I got that shot I realized that I really wanted action shots. Before, during, and after while using the chopper. That meant counter cleaning after each bit of usage. It meant positioning and repositioning to avoid glare. It meant messing with color balance. Did I mention I’m a perfectionist? I had a really hard time just saying “That’s good enough“. But I finally got a series of before-during-after photos of me chopping carrots. I even got some chopping onions. The actual chopping took under two minutes, the photographing and prior setup caused me to spend over 30 minutes messing around. But I kept telling myself, “This is good practice and preparation for future sessions”. I sure hope that’s the case or I’ll never get any meals finished and blogged about.

Next up, I started adding ingredients to the stock pot for the soup and tried to take pictures. I swear, the items on the counter were moving around, creating crazy photo bombs. I was moving around trying to get a decent angle for the soup, avoid glare, and get good color. I’d take a shot and wham, something was in the picture that didn’t belong there. And it was invariably placed somewhere that I could just crop it out.

I battled through that, but I’ll admit, the soup didn’t look all that great in the before photos. The color just seemed off. And to make matters worse, this sort of soup looks kind of icky when you’re making it. Not the kind of things you want to post for fear that my readers will be grossed out. So the soup pictures were relegated to the cutting room floor.

For the during photos, I really wanted to concentrate on the phase where you have to remove the skin and bones from the soup. This is a pain in the backside, and you have to be really, really patient. There are a couple of tricks to this, so I wanted to document them. Of course, I was using a set of tongs, a skimmer spoon, and a knife. And I had the camera setup. I’ve decided that I need a voice-activated camera. Preferably one that can just follow the food around and not make me hold it just so to get a decent shot. So I would get some of the weird little bones dredged up from the bottom of the pot. Then I would quickly wipe my hand somewhere so that I could hit the button on the camera and take a shot. And then another. Then I would adjust the positioning to get rid of that stupid glare.

I finally got all the pictures I wanted…and they promptly went to the cutting room floor. I’m going to have to figure out a different way to document that step. Everything looked icky. It looked that way in real life too, so it wasn’t just the photography. Close-ups of turkey bones and skin just aren’t that appealing.

More importantly, when I was wiping my hands between photos I didn’t do a really good job. So I had to spend a good half-hour cleaning the camera for fear that it would be turkey-soup stained and greasy for all eternity.

Now, you might be thinking that I wrote this post to simply complain and claim that I’m either done blogging about food preparation or some other poppy cock. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m writing this all out to, sort of, throw down the gauntlet for myself and create some motivation to figure out how to do this better. I probably won’t always write a behind-the-scenes post, but you may see them from time-to-time.

Now, if I could just find that part of silicone-covered tongs for my next gadget post…