The last two weeks have been a crazy whirlwind of food, photography, and WAY too much eating. My stove has been getting a serious work out as a result of us shooting our first e-cookbook! This is a reward we promised to our Kickstarter backers, who made it possible for us to produce Season 1 of Bits & Pieces, our online cooking show.
But once we reward our backers, we plan to make this available for sale as well. Since it’s a “self-published” e-cookbook, and not a professional printed version, honestly, we could probably be a little relaxed about it, take freeze frames of our videos, and call it a day right? But you know us, and that’s not how we roll!
We want to be proud of everything we “throw out there” into the world. So we went all out and re-shot 15 of the best recipes from Season 1, in order to include clear step-by-step photography, interesting bonus tid-bits, and better final “beauty” shots of the food.
Call us crazy, but we always aim to give you our best work and keep up with our own high standards. So we’re treating this e-cookbook exactly as a “real” published cookbook produced by a team of people, when in reality, it’s just us doing everything again.
It was fun trying to be creative and shooting in our own unique style. But it was also stressful because in order to get this cookbook done as quickly as possible, we shot two recipes a day, everyday for 10 days.
Preparing for this sucker required strategic planning. Looking back, I realize that all my food styling jobs in the past were training for what we’re doing now. It helped me to stay organized and efficient.
This is what our dining room table looked like. Everyday, I would go “grocery shopping” for ingredients here. Our fridge was so full, if you opened it too quickly, you would be buried under an avalanche of food.
It was pretty exhausting cooking this much, but at least Joe did all the dish washing. We ended up coming up with a routine that worked pretty well. In the mornings, we’d shoot one recipe, break for lunch, wash the dishes, and clean the kitchen. Then in the afternoons, we’d shoot the second recipe, break for dinner, wash the dishes, and clean the kitchen, and get ready for the next day.
In the midst of all the food photographs, and sometimes fights, we even took time to document some of the behind the scenes shenanigans that we’ll be posting in an upcoming vlog. So remember to subscribe! You know we always gotta bring you along for the ride!
This last picture especially makes me chuckle, because it reminds me of that endearing scene in the movie Julie & Julia, where Julia Child and her husband Paul were shooting her first cookbook together. Heck, if Julia Child can work with her husband to shoot a best selling cookbook, maybe we can too!
