Photo Challenge, Part 1

A month ago, Heather and I began a 30-photo challenge. I've been spending a fair amount of time lately trying to learn as much about photography as I can. Undoubtedly one of the best ways to do so is to get the gear out and practice! Heather came across a website that proposed taking 30 photographs in 30 days, with each focusing on a certain style or technique. That link will open a new window where you can check out each of the 30 topics. Although we immediately realized that taking 30 technical pictures in 30 days wasn't realistic for us, we wanted to give it a try! So here we are a month later to present our progress. This is definitely a joint effort and so far we've really enjoyed it. Heather definitely has the more artistic eye while I tend to be in charge of selecting the technical aspects of the camera and lens. All of our pictures (but one) are taken on a Nikon D7000. We hope you enjoy our pictures and that it motivates you to take a few yourselves!

The first shot was self portrait. For this, we set up a tripod in our driveway and took shots in our front yard after church on Easter. You may have seen these pictures on Instagram but we thought we'd include them again here. I didn't realize until afterwards that I had forgotten to shoot in RAW format so my ability to touch these up was really limited.

Next up was the rule of thirds. This is a common composition technique where the frame is divided into a 3x3 grid. Instead of placing objects of interest (strong lines, eyes, light sources, etc.) in the center of the frame as we're all tempted to do, place them either along major lines or where lines intersect. After reading this, I came to realize that I was almost always violating this "rule". Here's an honest attempt to follow it!

Heather and I went to Percy Warner park last weekend and found these interesting curves. We wanted to make something out of it so here's a shot of what they look like, following by hopefully a more artistic approach including some foreground foliage.

For the black and white, I'm reusing one of my favorite shots I've ever taken of Heather. This was from a trip to Arrington vineyard last fall.

Next up was texture. You can find these stone walls all over Nashville, especially in the Belle Meade area.  I particularly like how there are a bunch of small stones crammed in the extra spaces rather than using mortar.

For the high angle shot, I had to use one I took from a flight from Austin to Nashville. I had never seen clouds form like that before! Have you?

For the low angle shot, I took this at the John F.Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. At the end of the tour, you walk into this huge sun room overlooking the water. The huge American flag was an obvious point of interest and I happened to sneak behind Heather while she looked up at it. If I could do it again I'd try to get a little lower and closer to her.

We tried to get some good silhouette shots in Boston but none of them turned out. I think we learned some valuable things about what NOT to do, and we'll keep trying!

Sunset was next on the list and we got a great shot at McCabe golf course a few nights ago. The shot didn't really come together until I got to work on it in photoshop and we realized while we were out there that we definitely have some things to learn about sunset photography too!

Next up is bokeh (pronounced BOW-kay), which is the fancy termed for a blurred out background. This technique is typically used to isolate a subject from the background, as in portrait photography and/or to give some depth to the shot. Here are a couple of ours!

The last topic we've covered so far is lens flare. This one is probably self-explanatory. The first shot was pretty intentional while the rainbow in the second picture was a nice surprise when I started editing.

So that's it for now! We'll continue to get out there and experiment with various techniques and bring our results to you in bunches like this. We hope you enjoy this and ultimately that it inspires you to take a camera outside and experiment yourself with some of these ideas!

Until next time!

New Recipe Week

Our last blog post was all about getting out of our regular dinner routine by doing a week of all Thai food recipes. After a few weeks of returning to some of our favorite dishes, we decided to be a little adventurous again by trying a new recipe each night for a week. We are both inspired by our mothers who bravely approach new recipes much of the time when they have company over. Conventional wisdom would say they are crazy, and they would be better off preparing something they know they can make well. But not our mothers! They say that having company over is the perfect opportunity to try a new recipe because if it fails, they can simply blame it on the recipe! We hoped we wouldn't have to make any excuses this week and fortunately I'd say we came out on top. Whether you're having company over or not, we hope you give at least one of these a try!

New Recipie #1

Teriyaki Salmon with Sriracha Cream Sauce found on Pintrest via http://damndelicious.net/.  

I'm sure many of you have seen those websites that highlight all the "Pinterest Fails" - those attempts to recreate a pinterest masterpiece that end up looking nothing like the original. Shown here first is the Pinterest inspiration, then our work.

Our attempt:

We definitely could have done a better job with the cream sauce and garnish. But at least it was really tasty!

 New Recipie #2

Asparagus Frittata with Mint and Parmesan via The New Best Recipe cookbook.  

We mentioned this cookbook in our last blog and it really is amazing!  Every recipe in this book is well tested and perfected!  The mint and parmesan work so well together in this recipe to lighten it up and give a bright, fresh taste.

 

New Recepie #3

Grilled Ginger-Sesame Chicken Chopped Salad via http://www.cookingclassy.com.  

We did more shopping at K&S for all the lovely fresh produce for this recipe; ginger, green onions, cilantro, and napa cabbage. It was a little flash back to our Thai week and it was awesome.

 

New Recipe #4

Spicy Black Bean Soup. 

 We've both been quite fond of black beans for a while and when we came across this recipe, we knew we had to try it. It also gave us an opportunity to use one of our favorite cheeses at the moment, queso fresco. Queso fresco is a mild, crumbly cheese that is often crumbled and served over the top of your Mexican food. This turned out amazing, spicy and delicious.  Just saute the veggies, add the remaining ingredients and then use an immersion blender to smooth it out.  We served it with cheese quesadillas.  This was Heather's favorite new recipe we tried!

New Recipe #5 

Stuffing Waffles.  

You read that right. We made stuffing and then put it in the waffle maker.  This idea came from an episode of Diners Drive-ins and Dives.  The idea was so outlandish, so fantastic, so interesting, we just had to try it!  These turned out really great (how could they not?) and we served them with chicken (seasoned with herbs de provence), green beans and cranberry sauce.

And there ya have it! Five new recipes in one week! We had a lot of fun trying these and we hope you'll try one too. This may be it for food blogs for now. At the moment, we're working on a 30-step photography challenge that you'll be able to follow on our Instagram pages. Until next time!

Taste of Thai: Part 2

Welcome back to episode two of Taste of Thai! Last time, we put together two of our three favorite Thai dishes and both turned out really great. Pad Thai is probably the dish we make most often, and the Thai peanut chicken pizza is one of our newer favorites. We also finally came across a great peanut sauce recipe that we can't wait to refine and make again! So far so good!

Here are most of the ingredients we had at the beginning of the week.

Dinner on Friday is reserved for happy hour each week, so our goal was to make it from Sunday through Thursday. With Sunday and Monday covered in the last episode, we'll pick up with Tuesday's dinner. Massaman curry was up next on the menu and we have been making this dish for several years. If you've never made curry before, and you're hoping to have something like what is served at a Thai restaurant, the key is not curry powder. Curry powder is great in Indian food, and I like to add a pinch to my sloppy joes, but what you're really looking for is curry paste. You can buy curry paste for massaman, red, green, and sour red curry. And I'm sure there are others too!

This massaman curry paste is a fantastic, flavorful foundation to the dish. It is made of shallot, dried red chili, garlic, lemongrass, galangal (similar to ginger), cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, and cumin. After sauteeing some paste in vegetable oil for a few minutes, add coconut milk (have I mentioned that is one of my favorite things at the moment??), chicken, potato, onion, pad thai sauce, peanut butter, roasted peanut, brown sugar, and fish sauce.

I told Heather there would only be enough for me.

Just kidding!

Our version tends to come out a bit thicker and creamier than the ones you see if you search online for pictures. Ours is also a bit less "rustic" looking as some versions use quartered potatoes instead of cubed, and whole chicken drumsticks and other large cuts. We've only ever used chicken but I imagine it would also be delicious with beef.

Wednesday is my day to work late at the VA, so we wanted to have something fairly quick and simple. Perfect day for spring rolls! Definitely not a complicated thing to put together, and it gave us the perfect opportunity to polish off our tasty peanut sauce.

Heather got things started before I got home so I didn't get any pictures of the assembly process, but I'm sure you can imagine it. We use round spring roll wrappers from the asian grocery store. They just need to be soaked in warm water for 10-20 seconds to make them pliable. Then, add shredded carrot, lettuce, shrimp, ride noodles, and cilantro.

Nothing to it!

For our last Thai meal of the week we decided to try something entirely new. This box caught our eye at World Market and we thought we'd give it a try.

Seemed simple enough. Cook the noodles, add some chicken, onion, included coconut powder and curry paste, add vegetable, etc.

Unfortunately, the included sauce was very salty and way too fishy. We diluted it as much as possible, and tried to keep the sauce to a minimum when we dished up our portions.

Not yum...

And this concludes our taste of Thai! You can probably tell that our two favorite thai flavors to cook with are peanut and coconut. Obviously this isn't a representative look at thai food and I'm sure there are tons and tons of fantastic dishes that we don't know about, or haven't had the huevos to try yet.

Our plan is to go back to our "regular" menu for this week, and next week we're going to do 5 new dishes in a row! That should be a fun way to bring you something interesting to read about as many of the dishes will hopefully be new to you as well. Plus. we won't be stuck with a single ethnicity for a week. We hope you enjoyed reading about our adventures and are really looking forward to posting again in a couple weeks!

Until then, happy eating and happy living!

Taste of Thai: Part 1

And we're back! Not wanting to upset anyone who only cares for a blog post every 6-9 months, we've paused to let you all recover from our last post to bring you the latest from the Davis household. Many of our previous posts have had to do with some sort of adventure out of town. This time, we're up to something kind of fun here at our house!

In order to combat the mundanity of our weekly menu planning, we decided to challenge ourselves to see if we could cook Thai food each night for a week. I know, it might sound a bit strange to combat mundanity with a menu entirely of one country, but we love Thai food and were curious to see how the week would go. So let's get started, beginning with dinner last night.

Pad Thai

We've been making this dish since we first got married. I was introduced to this dish at a number of fantastic Thai restaurants in Bellingham while I lived there during undergrad. I lived in an apartment for two years just down the street from a restaurant called Busara. Being a college student living with two other guys, we tended to enjoy not cooking as much as anybody else. In the years since, I've always used Pad Thai as a metric for how much I like any Thai restaurant. Fortunately, the closest restaurant to our current home in Nashville serves a fantastic Pad Thai! As we've mentioned before on this blog, we really enjoy trying to recreate our favorite restaurant dishes at home. So yesterday, we whipped up another batch of our favorite noodle dish.

We got our recipe from the 1,000+ page cookbook called The New Best Recipe from the Editors of Cooks Illustrated. Yes. You want to click the link and buy the book. Best $20 you can spend for your kitchen. It's perhaps best described as a modern-day Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. Not in the sense of being a complete work of one country's food, but in the astonishing thoroughness of the recipes. They don't just provide a recipe and instructions for Pasta with Bolognese Sauce. No. They write 4 pages on their experiences making the dish with celery, onion, and carrot, and then describe the issues with including celery. Then they describe the flavor without including celery. Painstaking, much? The front cover boasts that they made 38 versions of creme caramel in order to find the best one! Julia Child was of the same caliber of dedication in the name of best serving the home cook. Love it! The first two sentences of the Pad Thai recipe are "Pad Thai is a remedy for a dead, jaded palate. Hot, sweet, and pungent Thai flavors tangled in an un-Western jumble of textures awaken all of the senses that have grown weary of the usual grub." So true!

We've made their recipe several times and have adjusted it over time for our tastes. Here's what we include:

Onion (or shallot)
minced garlic
medium rice noodles
chicken (seasoned with salt and pepper, diced)
egg
pad thai sauce (or tamarind sauce)
rice vinegar
fish sauce
brown or palm sugar
crushed peanuts
bean sprouts
lime juice


And here's what it looks like!

YUM

Keeping things moving, tonight (Monday) we made Thai chicken pizza. This recipe comes from Pioneer Woman and I don't think we've changed anything on it yet. The interesting thing about this recipe is that we successfully made our own peanut sauce for the first time this week! We've tried to make peanut sauce before from a few different recipes online and they were all awful. They just tasted like peanut butter, and lacked the wonderful richness of the stuff we get at our Thai restaurant down the road, Golden Thai. There's a lady at the restaurant that knows if Heather walks in without me, she's there to buy a small container of peanut sauce. "Why don't you just make it at home?" she asks. "It's really easy!" Look lady, we'd tried it. It didn't work. We want to give you money for yours. K? Thanks. :)

Gone are those days because Heather found this recipe on Pinterest and we decided to give it a try. Here's what's included in the peanut sauce, plus sesame oil:

Gotta be one of the most wonderful sauces we know! And after a slight adjustment (less ginger, add cayenne pepper, slightly more coconut milk, slightly less peanut butter) it should be exactly the same as at the restaurant.

We made the peanut sauce, in part, for tonight's pizza and also as a dip for a dish later in the week.

For the pizza, we use a store bought pizza dough. After pre-baking it, we cover it in a thin layer of sweet chili sauce. Mozzarella cheese and diced chicken go on top and the pizza is baked the rest of the way.  We buy many these ingredients like the coconut milk, sweet chili sauce, fish sauce, pad thai sauce, and noodles at a local Asian grocery store called K&S on Charlotte Pike. It's fantastic!! Buying products there definitely helps get you closer to the authentic flavors of the restaurant.

After topping it off with bean sprouts, carrot, cilantro, and a drizzle of peanut sauce, it's ready!

YUM again

So we're two days in and still loving Thai food! We'll be back in a day or two with a couple more dishes!