To Photo or Not to Photo

Thursday Menu: Lunch: Buffalo Chicken Twice Baked Potatoes and Carrot Sticks Dinner: Beef Stew, Rolls and Brownies

I love food blogs with lovely, colorful photos showing every step of the cooking process. They make the recipe so appetizing. They make you want to jump in your kitchen and start cooking that dish right away! And I would love to have that kind of photo gracing my every post. I would post photos that show that I have a lovely clean workspace, spotless kitchen appliances, and beautiful picture-worthy cooking utensils. Ahh… What a sweet dream. There’s just one problem (actually several). I work in a frat house kitchen. A kitchen which the frat boys clean, and which is older than dirt (I think the first dirt invented is actually in that kitchen). I do, when need demands, rewipe a surface or rewash a pan. But the major part of the cleaning is up to the guys, and I’m sure I mentioned before that frat boys are among the dirtiest and most foul creatures on earth. So, I would be terrified to show pictures of a sauce simmering on the stove, only to show that the backsplash is so black and grimy that it defies logic. I’m sure that anyone reading this would immediately close the blog, shudder, and then fast for a week because the image so nauseated them. Ok, maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s not a pretty picture (that pun’s for you Lee). It is an industrial kitchen, it is older than dirt, the pots and pans are dinged and dented, the knives are dull and notched, and the walls are stained yellow with years of cooking.

The other major obstacle to posting photos is that I am no photog. I can point and shoot. And, that is the extent of the capabilities of my poor old camera. It can point and shoot. The photos for other food blogs are made with fancy expensive cameras, and they use words like aperture and flash. I don’t even know how to spell aperture correctly (spell check corrected it for me).

On the other hand, I hate cookbooks that don’t have pictures of the finished product. I like to know what the food is supposed to look like so I’ll know if it’s all going horribly wrong, and that no, indeed, the pan sauce is not supposed to be purple. So, I’m in a quandary, do I post pictures or no? I’ll have to think about this one.