I was eating cold slices of leftover grilled steak and just had to take a photo.

I love happy meat!

The arranged slices are out of order - I had already eaten half of the steak by the time I noticed. But wouldn’t it have been fun to arrange them in order, fan through them like one of those kids flip sketch books and see the range of facial expressions!!

Or damn. If I wasn’t so hungry, I could have sold these meat slices on EBay.

I could be a rich! famous! or just stupid and the subject of endless mockery.

but I do like happy meat. and there are SO many jokes that are running through my head right now but I’ll just keep to myself because my mother reads my blog now.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had my food smile at me:

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Thank you Washington Post!

Food columnist, Kim O’Donnel from the Washington Post interviewed several female food writers and bloggers to share their favorite ways to cool off in the kitchen — suppers that are raw, uncooked or using as little stovetop power as possible.

Come read our answers! Bea of La Tartine Gourmande and Rachel of Coconut and Lime also contributed!

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As you know, I’m doing all the cooking, writing and photographing for the Steamy Kitchen cookbook.

Today, I’m taking a photo of Grilled Pineapple with Chocolate Coconut Rum Sauce for the book, and I thought I’d let you take a peek into one of the most idiotic things I have to do in order to get the most perfect shot for the book.

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Instead of showing you some the of photos that are going into the book, I thought I’d show you one that isn’t.

This is a photo of Indonesian Beef Satay with Peanut Sauce. I do looooove the photo, however, I’ll have to re-shoot.

Let’s play! Can you guess why?

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Today is Saturday, May whatever. This morning I woke up and FINALLY gave myself permission to be sick. After uttering those words to my bedside lamp, the already straining cork that had been clinging on for dear life where head meets nose the past 4 days, holding back the gush of mucus (gross), finally popped.

I am sick.

Which, in all honesty, just being sick actually feels better than my mind knowing that my body is sick but demanding, “Man up, soldier! YOU ARE NOT SICK.” Yesterday was a big day, when Holly, my editor, flew all the way down from Vermont (brrr) to Florida (aaaahhh) and spent the day with me in the kitchen. It just would have sucked to be snottin’ and sneezing all over the food. It was an absolute must that I was healthy - er- at least functioning fairly well for that day.

Our plan was to spend the day cooking, testing/writing recipes, photographing, eating and editing. Ok, really, my agenda was to distract her as much as possible in the kitchen, get her drunk so that we could forget about editing. Cuz me no likey editing. You could threaten to take a hammer to my cherished kiwi Le Creuset baby dutch oven and I still would choose THAT over picking apart words and trying to come up with a suitable phrases to replace my babbling, wandering musings and cussing. <– that sentence was a run-on and probably didn’t make much sense.

But, I’m totally stoned on Nyquil right now. So back the hell off.

I wanted to show Holly what a “day in the life of a deranged, disorganized food blogger, cookbook-author wannabe” would be like. And boy, did I work her ass off. We created 4 new recipes, photographed them for the book and fed the dinner party for that evening. I had scribbled down recipes for 4 dishes that I had created in my SICK BUT NOT SICK head and when she arrived, I thrusted my notes to Holly and said, “here are my recipe notes!”

They really shouldn’t be classified as “recipes,” because they looked like this:

hoisin, honey, ginger but maybe garlic or maybe just omit both, how about orange marmalade? could use palm sugar too, 5sp, S+P, ribs, slow+low and glaze.

Holly looked at me with the “this is a recipe? are you fucking serious, lady?” look and then muffled into her sleeve, “bluejay calling mother hen…red alert..I REPEAT…red alert…operation steamykitchen is a no go….requesting permission to abort mission.”

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My cookbook editor, Holly, is flying down to Florida and spending the entire day/eve with me tomorrow! I”m really looking forward to meeting her in person, since we’ve been working closely together for the past few months.

We’ll be spending the day cooking, testing, photographing, editing (ugh) and feasting!

As you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time honing my food photography skills, and I just learnd from David Lebovtiz that professional food photographers can make about $1,000 per shot! Of course, that fee includes a professionally equipped photo studio with expensive lights, a gazillion props and backgrounds, photographer’s assistants, catered lunch and food stylists.

Sadly, I do not have Food Fluffers.

And my studio is pretty ghetto:

no catered lunch either…I just eat the set.

If you’re curious, the reason my ottoman is scarred…it’s because one day I was too lazy to lug out the ironing board. And I only had to iron in big-ass wrinkle out of my dress. So I used the ottoman.

Let’s just say that the extra $100 spent having all furniture sprayed with Scotch-Guard stain resistant spray burns quite easily. (yes, i know. grammer sux. my subject-modifier thingy is all wrong. Too busy to fix)

and another shot…

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Vietnamese Pulled Pork Sliders (one of the recipes in my cookbook)

The Steamy Kitchen cookbook is well under way. I’ve been working hard refining my photography skills, such as food styling, composition, lighting and learning how to use my camera beyond just the “automatic” settings. You guys want to hear more about my cookbook?

Periplus/Tuttle is my publisher, they’re responsible for at least 35% of my annual cookbook budget, meaning I already own A LOT of their cookbooks:

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