What’s happening here and why should I care about it? That’s what you’re probably asking yourself. And, to be honest it’s what I’m asking myself. Here’s my side of it anyway.
Sometime this past winter, much to my delight, my wife gave me a gift. A copy of Julia Child’s classic, two volume, cooking manual, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. I was really surprised and happy about it. Considering it wasn’t really that long ago that she informed my that I couldn’t purchase any more cook books. They had begun to take over the kitchen and our book shelves. Now she was actively engaged to making my collection grow! This was a breakthrough.
I love to cook. I’m not a professional chef by a long shot, but I consider myself to be a fairly competent home cook. About this same time I had decided that I would like to learn how to take decent photographs of food. I own and operate a restaurant and dining web site here in Sarasota Florida. I thought that my new found skill would be an asset to dineSarasota.com. Everybody loves to see food photography and I had a natural outlet to use the images. Sounds great.
My thought was I could whip up the recipes in my new book, take photos of my creations and then post them on the web. It would take three things that I was interested in and combine them into one great project. What an awesome idea! Well, as it turns out, I wasn’t the first one to think this would be fantastic. In fact, I came to find out after some research that someone had cooked Julia’s book AND blogged about it AND written a book about it AND they were making a major motion picture about it. How’s that for a great idea about two years too late!
I was bummed out. I still wanted to do this, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was either jumping on some band wagon or stealing someone’s idea. What to do?
After some thought I decided that the concept was still OK and I still wanted to learn about food photography and improving my cooking skills. I figured I would just go for it. But, how would I put my own stamp on something that had just been done and was about to get some big time exposure?
I Want To Learn To Take Photos Like These!
While looking through my collection of cook books another one of my wife’s gifts jumped out at me. Marcella Hazan’s groundbreaking work on Italian cuisine. The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is a 688 page combination of her two first books, The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking. These books were responsible for bringing traditional Italian methods of cooking to American kitchens. First published over 25 years ago, these volumes were the first exposure many home cooks had to the proper ways to prepare classic Italian dishes. Marcella was to the Italian cooking movement in the states what Julia Child was to French cuisine. I thought this book would be an excellent choice for my project.
There are approximately 445 recipes in her book, I plan on tackling all, or at least most of them. I’m not sure how long that will take, but I guess we’ll find out. I’m going to cook most of these myself in my kitchen at home, using equipment that a normal home cook would have. To make things just a bit more interesting, I also plan on calling in some experts. One of the nice things about being involved in the dining and restaurant scene here in Sarasota is that I have made a lot great friends who are REAL chefs. I’m going to put some of them to work over the course of this project. I think it will be interesting to see how a seasoned pro goes about doing things compared to a novice.
I’m planning on costing out each recipe so we can see how much you would need to spend to prepare it. With the economy the way it is right now, everyone is watching their bottom line. It’s going to be interesting to see how these traditional dishes fit into our current budgets. And, last but not least, there is a local connection. Marcella Hazan lives here in Sarasota. Wouldn’t I just love to prepare a couple of dishes with the author herself! I’m going to work on that, so stay tuned. I’m going to get cooking soon. Buon Appetito!
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Well, as someone who cannot cook…can barely find her way to the kitchen from the office…I am very interested in seeing how this experiment turns out for you! If you ever need guest taste testers Hubs and I are just a Twitter away! We’ll even bring the wine.
This seems very interesting. I can’t wait to see how this experiment turns out.