My top 10 cookbooks

Looking for a present for the cook in your life, especially if that's you? These are my favourite 10 cookbooks in the 40 year journey from kitchen duffer to food photographer, from a few 'tried and tested' recipes and 'good plain cooking', to promiscuous eating - one-night stands with recipes that catch my eye. It's not that I don't enjoy them and want to repeat the pleasure but there's the lure of new sensations, feeding my inner Casanova.

'I have also been extravagantly fond of good food and irresistibly drawn by anything which could excite curiosity.' Giacomo Casanova, History of my Life

Feel free to add your favourite cookbook to my list and if I don't have it already, I'll add it to my wish-list.

Pink Reims biscuits

I want to say thank you to some of the cooks who've enriched my life and shared their love of food.

1974 The Cookery Year

amazon link The Cookery Year 1974 edition

'Jean can't cook. She has her nose in a book all the time.' My mother's description was probably accurate on both counts but it didn't stop her presenting me with my first cookery book when I left home at eighteen to go to university. I learned to cook from books and from experiments, with many disasters. 40 years later, this book is still on my shelf, long after I lost the parents who wrote 'Best culinary wishes' on the fly leaf and signed with love.

The 'basics' sections at the front and back are still the best I know, and the pages with clear explanations on cooking methods and terms are the most spattered with grease and stains of all my books. Organisation by month is good for using produce in season, the basis is British but recipes are varied and international. There are prettier cookbooks but if I could only have one, this would be my choice - well done, mother.

Favourite recipes - Welsh cakes, sweet and sour pork, dolmas (nowadays made with fresh vine leaves from the garden)

1975 Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking

amazon.com link

This was my second cookbook, an exploration of other cultures and cuisine. For someone from the sort of British army background where 'sauce' was considered filthy foreign muck, it was an eye-opener. I cooked more disasters than edible meals from its pages but I learned from my mistakes. I also learned that food is a way of relating to people all over the world, and that I'd missed opportunities already. When we lived in Hong Kong, my mother helped our amah gain promotion to cook-amah by learning to make chips (!). I wish I'd sat cross-legged with her on the floor by her wok and watched her make her own meals. But I was nine, Ah-ho liked my little sister and in those days I expected people to choose between us.

1982 The Sunday Times Book of Real Bread - multi-authors

amazon.com link

It's not fashionable in these days of gluten-free, dairy-free and vegan (and my family includes all manner of special dietary requirements) but I love freshly baked bread and cheese. Some women love chocolate; I can't resist dairy products. I was probably a mouse in a former existence. This book is remarkable for its contributors as well as its bread recipes from round the world; top cookery writers of the time have chosen their favourite bread recipes, tips and techniques. There are few photos and this is only for someone who seriously loves baking bread. I highly recommend the Cretan Olive Bread.


1985 500 Recipes for Jams, Pickles and Chutneys - Marguerite Patten

amazon uk link

Now a Collector's Item, first published in 1963. My 1985 edition contains 500 recipes for jam, pickles and chutney that all work. That's it. No frills, no photos, no entertainment. Marguerite Patten was my mother's favourite cook, author of the one cookbook in our house. Unfortunately that book went missing so this is as close as I get to inherited recipes, apart from the three favourites that my sister and I pieced together; our mother's Christmas cake, meat roll and pear suchard.

1993 Feasts of Provence - Robert Carrier 

amazon.com link

A mix of travel and cooking that shows an insider's Provence. Robert Carrier knows and loves the region and the food. He introduces us to the people who share recipes with him. This is where I now live and the classic Provencal recipes are here, including ratatouille, but the book also conveys a style of life and cooking. Garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, tapenade, toasts, grilled fish and sunshine.

1994 The Complete Indian Cookbook  - Mridula Brijikar

amazon.com link

As with many of my cookbooks, I bought this one from one of the special discount offers that reps brought to the school where I was a teacher. I've cooked dozens of the recipes and all of them have worked perfectly to give me the sort of Indian dishes I love. A photo with each recipe so you know what the end product should look like, clear instructions and ingredients that don't scare you.

2000 Vegetables - Antonio Carluccio

amazon.com link

One of the TV chefs who has inspired me, Carluccio also changed the cooking of my sous-chef (aka my husband) with this book. It's organised alphabetically by vegetable, under its Italian names, which is fun when you get the hang of it. Making the vegetable into the star changes the perspective of many cooks and if you want meat as well, simple grilled meat can be served with these yummy vegetable dishes. Like most TV cooks, Carluccio introduces personal anecdotes into his books and gives you travel reading (Italy) and entertainment as well as recipes.

My other favourite source to feed vegetarian visitors is Rose Elliot's Vegetable Cookery but that never had the same impact on the sous-chef so Carluccio wins.

2004 Recettes Gourmandes des Boulangers d'Alsace Vol 1 and Vol 2

amazon

Another  that's apparently a Collector's Item now. I found this French gem in the Bakers' Tent at the Christmas Market, Strasbourg, 'the Christmas Capital of the World', Alsace. Completely authentic Alsace bakers' recipes and my Christmas wouldn't be right without something from this book - open it and smell the cinnamon in the mulled wine, hear the merry-go-round, taste fresh bretzels and shiver with cold. Maybe I should offer to bring out an English translation?

2005 Larousse de la cuisine

amazon uk link

I bought the earlier 2005 version of this when on a camping trip. It cost the most I've ever spent on a cookbook and was my first French one. I learned French food and cooking terms this way. 'La bible de la cuisine' is huge and French. It is organised alphabetically, which is incredibly difficult to find your way round but great fun for random enjoyment. The photography is beautiful and the recipes are inspirational, even if you can never find them again. The best French lesson I've ever had and a book I often dip into.

2011 The Hairy Bikers' Family Cookbook - Mums Know Best - Si King & Dave Myers

amazon link Mums Know Best

Mums Know Best combines nostalgia for family food traditions with an international repertoire that struck me paradoxically as the best of British cuisine. This collection of Britain's favourite family recipes, handed down through generations, draws from origins in Scotland and Lebanon, England and Nepal, That's exactly what Britain is good at - multi-cultural cuisine.

The DVD that goes with the book adds to making the recipes. It shows the Hairy Bikers visiting people's homes to choose recipes for their events and for the book; the events brought tears to my eyes as all the people lined up to talk about their hand-written recipe books and memories.That's what it's all about - not the Michelin chefs, culinary secrets and artistic presentation. It's about you and me, cooking good food for our friends and families, passing recipes on to the next generation.

When my son told me, 'You're an excellent cook,' I wish his Grandma could have heard him.  And she would never have believed that I would write a cookbook myself.

Buy from lulu.com in print 
Buy epub
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Near misses for the top 10:-

The Covent Garden Co - Soup & Beyond. Truly creative and tasty soup recipes from the company that put fresh soup onto supermarket shelves twenty years ago.

Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef. Jamie Oliver is another TV chef who changed popular cooking and his first three books all make good reading and inspiring cooking.

Delia Smith's Winter Collection and Summer Collection. I fall asleep watching Delia on TV and am not fussed about cakes but I love her savoury recipes. She was the first to make Mediterranean ingredients and cooking style seem easy to British cooks. Her roasted vegetables, onion soup and casseroles are favourites.

Ken Hom's Hot Wok is perfect for me in its fusion of Asian and European style cooking. I like Chinese dishes but often find the recipes scary.

Jane Sigal Backroad Bistros Armchair travel round France through a superb collection of traditional recipes. No photos.

Over to you. Which is your favourite cookbook?

And the winning balls are...

You remember I blogged about shooting an olive ball recipe for a magazine? Original blog here.  Usually there are a few photographers shoot the same recipe and there's no guarantee that one of your images will be chosen. That was the case with the other recipes required but no-one else shot the olive balls so it was a no-brainer that one of my shots would be chosen. Maybe blogging about it scared off the competition - I might test that again next year some time.

That left my images competing against ... my images. And the winner was ... drum roll

Looks like the combination of hero olive ball with party background met what was required. If you're interested in the shots of the other recipes, check out the details here. My pork stew lost out to jonathansloane's warm take on this but I'm sure Jonathan and I will cross swords again for a re-match in 2012 - may the yummiest image win!

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A hero olive cheeseball and friends

The cheeseballs really are rolling - all 6 variations that I uploaded were accepted by the inspectors. Which would you choose to go beside the recipe in a magazine? Feel free to choose or critique in a comment on the post. The answer will be on my Blog as soon after the 16th December as the buyer chooses. You can check out the competition here


Note that the bottom two have my hero olive cheeseball, neatly cut in two to show the olive and pepper stuffing. I didn't realise when I was shooting but unfortunately the two halves look like mad glass eyes on a lumpy brown monster so some of my images would be great for Hallowe'en or a children's party but not for a serious magazine. If I'd had more time or energy, I'd have exaggerated the effect and shot some crazy ones too. Instead I have some that are just bad.

The close-up I posted last time was accepted too so that's number 6

1.

2.

3. Eye level with hero olive cheeseball

4. tall person view with hero olive cheeseball

5.

The deadline for the shoot isn't until 16th December so there is bound to be some competition by then. There's a lot of cameraderie amongst the food shooters who meet up in the Forums to respond to recipe requests so I usually play nice and post images early if I've had them accepted. This can backfire, like the time I posted before inspection and had straight rejections. Ouch! And obviously you're showing your hand so any little genius idea you've added might spark a better idea to trump yours.

I did shoot the pork stew too, for the same buyer, so I'll post those but I won't share the olive balls until nearer the deadline. I'm hoping no-one else will pick up on the New Year party favours idea so why make it easy for them? Of course if the competition read my blog, they're well ahead, and they can always check out my portfolio (Sort by Age to see the most recent). The truth is, the other food shooters are all so good they don't need my help but a little paranoia is good for business. Sometimes, the first images posted are just so good that everyone else wonders why they should bother but it's always interesting to compare takes on the same recipe.

There are 30,000 photographers selling over 8 million photos on istockphoto.com
so competition isn't just fierce, it's life-threatening for those who make stock their livelihood. I'm glad I'm not one of them.

Olive balls ready to roll

Basic olive balls, straight from the oven and straight from camera

The olive balls are cooked, they look good to me and actually they taste good (that's one less for the shoot). Great party food. I have all the props ready to play with, minus the extra stuffed olives, which I was going to use as background ingredients but I forgot and ate them.

Technical detail
The buyer likes a vertical and a horizontal version of the shot, doesn't usually like close-ups such as my image above, but prefers the angle that you'd get if you were a tall person looking at your dinner plate. As I'm not a tall person, I am imagining this. However, another food shooter I admire, and a competitor on the Recipe Requests, jonathansloane, took a great bird's eye shot for October requests and that was the squash casserole shot chosen, so what's usual isn't always what's best, and rules are there to be broken.

However, I've made mistakes in the past that I try to avoid:-

1) Too shallow a depth of field, especially when it gives alien blobs in the foreground or the cut edge of e.g. cheese or cake with only a tiny area in focus. As I often shoot hand-held, this is one of my big faults in order to get a fast shutter-speed and consequent sharpness. For the 'on the plate in front of you, tall person' angle, I usually start at f5.6 these days and when I find a composition I really like, I use the tripod for a few last shots.

2) Trailing off into dark background. Food likes backlighting and istock shots don't get rejected by the Inspectors for being high-key. I need to keep backgrounds bright - or have a reason for not doing so.

3) Dog hairs. You don't have a dog? Believe me, even if you don't have a dog, even if you've cleaned the life out of every item in your kitchen, some imperfection will be visible on your precious food when you view it at 200%. I've spent hours Photo-shopping brown dimples out of aubergines and tomatoes, wrinkled leaves on lettuce, or burnt corners on meat in casseroles. The truth is that real food rarely looks perfect and raw food straight form the garden that tastes wonderful usually looks a lot worse than out-of-season, supermarket produce that might as well be water for all the taste it has. For a food shot, only visually perfect is good enough.

Lens
Lenses are very personal choices. I shoot Nikon and my favourite for food shots is my 60mm f2.8 macro. It's a sharp, fast prime and there's no such thing as too close. Okay, it can be a bit temperamental on focus, and my eyesight isn't good enough for manual focus, but we've been buddies for three years now and we know each other. this was my first slr lens - crazy choice! Very me.

Sometimes I use my 70mm-200mm f2.8 as was suggested to me ages ago by yet another food shooter whose work I love, and who's also a qualified Chef with a restaurant in Ireland, foodandwinephotography A long lens gives lovely depth of field but there's the extra weight to consider = tripod

Image quality
I shoot RAW with basic jpeg so I can see results straight away but have the raw material to process in Photoshop, rather than in-camera additions.

After the shoot
I've taken 110 shots and I'm happy with them. I now need to choose about 6 to process and upload, to ensure I get one vertical, one horizontal to offer the buyer. My images will have to go through the istock inspection process and no-one can guarantee acceptance. The process will take a week or so before my images are up for sale and when they are, IF any of them get through inspection, I'll post a new blog so you can choose the one you like the best of mine, and see whether you prefer mine to the other takes on the recipe offered to the buyer. If you're one of my competitors, good luck, and may the photographer with the prettiest balls win.

Never trust the recipe

Measuring a cup of flour in a bra

You spotted the deliberate mistake in the recipe, right? Take another look.

Olive Balls
Serves 8–10 as appetizer


1 cup cheddar cheese, grated
¼ cup butter, softened
¼ teaspoon paprika
dash Tabasco or other hot sauce
¾ cup all-purpose flour
36–40 tiny pimento stuffed olives


Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl, mix together cheese, butter, paprika and hot sauce. Blend in flour. Shape dough into 1½-inch circles. Place olives in center and fold dough around olives to form balls. Refrigerate 10 minutes. Bake on lipped baking sheet for 20 minutes. Serve warm.

So, you spotted the deliberate mistake? No, me neither, at least not till I was happily whizzing cheese, butter and breadcrumbs, and recognized what my subconscious had told me from the start -  these ingredients make a crumb topping not a dough. So, the choice is whether to roll the olives in crumbs (nice idea - note to self, try it another time) or, as the rest of the recipe clearly requires, turn crumbs to dough.

I'm trying to keep to the recipe, as it's for a magazine, so I've added water, squidged the dough (which I consider to be pastry rather than dough but what would I know), and put it to chill.

American cup measures

Mistakes in recipes happen, especially at the pre-publication stage, when you can get typos, printing mistakes or - worst of all - recipes that just don't work.

International differences in measurements drive me crazy and ** Americans look away now and don't read this ** I hate the stupid idea of cup measurements. The attempt to rationalise an inexact measurement based on 19th century crockery, by standardising it in relation to real mathematical units, is like saying a donkey is equivalent to 120kg and then measuring in donkeys. Take a quarter cup of butter; I have actual cup measurements (as opposed to the ones in the top photo) so my cups are in fact standardised, but how much butter I fit into a quarter cup depends on how much I squidge it. If I squidge it lots, I can fit in twice as much. And don't start me on the difference between volume and weight.

You can also get outcomes that taste horrible but as taste is so personal, I just assume that someone will like it, and my job is to make it look appetising. I love to imagine all these people at home looking at my photo and saying, 'Oh my, that looks good! I'm surely going to make that!' And then I imagine it tasting really horrible, and them feeling cheated and never trusting anything or anyone ever again in their life. Maybe there ought to be a stop button on my imagination. Rewind. Back to the 'appetising food photo' bit. Stop.

Rolling stuffed olives in little circles of dough is very therapeutic and reminds me of being 6 years old and discovering playdough. I used to make little playdough cakes and sell them in my pretend shop so I guess I haven't changed. I don't actually have time to make little cheeseballs and I should be doing all kinds of chorse. Sometimes, when you don't have the time, is when it's very important to take time out for making cheeseballs.

Props for the shoot

Amazingly the dough quantities have worked quite well and I have 32 cheeseballs, now in the oven. None of them looks like a 'hero cheeseball', the technical term for an upfront perfect image (at least that's how I understand it). On the other hand, I don't think they'll all have to be out of focus. A food shooter I really admire is TheCrimsonMonkey, whose every food item is a hero, but his images are rocket science and mine are Everycook shots. There is room for many different styles of food shot.I want every human being to think 'That looks good. I can make that.'

Olive balls are in the oven and I'd already set up camera, lights and props. I bought some new tableware for this image and I don't know for sure what will suit. I imagine I'm going to have little brownish balls to shoot, I really liked the green in the tortilla shot and Fernando has that tableware so I looked for something on those lines. Also there's a New Year theme to the magazine so I found some 'papillottes' with no logos on. Papillottes are French chocolates,pralines or sometimes nougat sweets sold for Christmas and New Year, that have jokes, 'dictons' (traditional sayings) or quiz questions in them, a bit like Christmas crackers in the UK. They sometimes have 'crackers' that go bang, but more often not.

Bugger. I forgot and ate the garnish by mistake. Time to check how the cooking's going.

Before a food shoot

Spanish tortilla

'Let's shoot a tortilla', said my photographer friend Fernando when we were staying with him in Madrid. The beauty of this plan from my viewpoint was that he was going to do all the cooking and set up the lights. As is the way in Spain, the suggestion came at 9.00pm when, at home in France, I would usually be watching TV and winding down, not planning the evening meal.

We then went shopping, bought the green place mat, a brown one to go underneath, and lettuce, parsley and green peppers for garnish and to add more green, complementing the yellowish tortilla. Back home, we chose a white plate from Fernando's cupboard, he set up two speedlights, one for back light, one at 90 degrees to bring out texture and then all he had to do was cook.

The perfect tortilla straight from the pan

The tortilla went from frying pan to plate and photo in about 3 minutes and I think the freshness shows. I do know some of the tricks  - salt in beer to keep a head on it, polyurethane varnish on roast chicken - but I prefer to cook, shoot and eat, so I rarely use anything other than a flick of olive oil to improve the appearance of food in my shots.

One advantage of being cook, stylist and photographer - or of course working with Fernando - is that you have control over all aspects of the shoot, including timing.

As I couldn't use Fernando's lights, I wasn't going to bother taking a shot but he nagged me, I set up one speedlight and gave it a try. Moral: if you don't have the perfect set-up, shoot anyway! I like my tortilla shot and of course it has the memories of eating afterwards, nearing midnight, with a beautiful glass of Spanish red - I think it was rioja that time, my favourite.

Before a shoot
1. I list ingredients for the recipe and start the shopping list for what I need to buy.
2. I picture what the food will look like - colour, texture, firmness, shape, quantity are all important but I don't analyse. I know that I can't have a spoonful of tortilla  or a slice of tapenade. If I'm cooking something I can't visualise, I google it to get an idea of what it's supposed to turn out like.
3. I dress up the food different ways in my imagination, often at 3am when I can't sleep. Some people buy a new dress for a special occasion; the shoot is the special occasion for the food, and I want colours and a setting that make it food the star of the show.
4. Go shopping and buy not only the ingredients you need, but any extra props; table linen, crockery, glassware, food extras for show. Photographers often put raw ingredients in the shot with the finished dish, so you need to buy the extras, in perfect condition. I used apples from our orchard in my apple crumble (see previous blog) but I bought three perfect ones as props. They didn't taste as nice.
5. I decide where and when I'm going to shoot, so I can plan the cooking and know what lighting I'll need.
6. Try out the set-up with your props before you prepare the food. Sometimes the colours don't work together as you wanted. Sometimes props like a plate, a baguette or a glass of wine look gigantic and disproportionate when you see what the camera sees. Most food shots are vertical orientation. There's something to do with composition and perspective that just works better, but some buyers like copyspace or room to crop as they choose. I try to take different versions.

Painters come to Provence for the light so I take food outdoors to shoot whenever I can. This has led to salad garnish dancing off into the Mistral, umbrellas keeling over and the mystery of the black, shiny lump in the frame. This was of course the dog's nose. When I shoot food, the dog becomes very interested. She has figured out that the more absorbed I become in looking through the black box, the more chance she has of sneaking up on the goodies and giving a surreptitious lick. So another part of preparation is

7. the anti-dog barricade. Or I make her do a very long downstay. Nowadays she usually just lies down and watches, of her own accord.

Where I shoot
Indoors

harvest basket of fruit and veg, isolated on white

You can make a shoot corner in your kitchen so it's easy to move from cooking to shooting. I use a wheelie trolley with a granite top, backlit by the window, with two speedlights, two umbrellas and a reflector chiming in as necessary.

I'm lucky and have an attic that's been turned into a photography playroom - studio is too grand a word and the ceiling is too low for convenience - so if I'm isolating food on white, I go upstairs into the attic, where I use a skylight plus speedlights and umbrellas, and a glass-topped table.

Spinach salad with orange

Outdoors
I love outdoor light and have three different places with outdoor tables where I can have garden background and natural light, using speedlight and umbrella for fill as required. I sometimes use a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse bright sunlight.

I shot the spinach salad with orange outdoors and I like the out of focus garden, house, summer ambience I get when everything works i.e. when I don't have pouring rain/harsh shadows/flies on the food. This one was for a cookbook request.

I'm not a chef, am self-taught as a cook and I just can't hack it with those perfect food shots where everything is white on white, high key, and precision presentation, so I've made a virtue out of necessity and my style is more country kitchen than restaurant. I devour French gourmet magazines and I love Mediterranean cuisine and style - and colour.


Suppose you want an image of a particular recipe for your website, blog or a cookbook? Nowadays you don't have to commission a food photographer if you don't mind other people using the same image. Just post a Request on istockphoto and a food shooter will respond, often food shooters, plural. You get the exact photo you want for the same price as any stock photo. Why do we sell our work so cheaply? This is the world of stock photography and if you sell the same photo 500 times you make more than for one big commission - well, I can dream, can't I?!

Now you're ready to join me in the Challenge


This is the recipe I've chosen to shoot for a buyer's request. I aim to shoot during the next week, not before Wednesday, and I'll post each stage I go through. If you were shooting this, what would you be thinking and doing to prepare?

The recipe
Olive Balls
Serves 8–10 as appetizer


1 cup cheddar cheese, grated
¼ cup butter, softened
¼ teaspoon paprika
dash Tabasco or other hot sauce
¾ cup all-purpose flour
36–40 tiny pimento stuffed olives


Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl, mix together cheese, butter, paprika and hot sauce. Blend in flour. Shape dough into 1½-inch circles. Place olives in center and fold dough around olives to form balls. Refrigerate 10 minutes. Bake on lipped baking sheet for 20 minutes. Serve warm.

Shooting food

More of my food photos here www.istockphoto.com

Chicken and broccoli pasta

Here in the south of France the hills are alive with the sound of gunshot. La Drôme, where I live, is the only departement where hunting is allowed every day of the week and from September until January, walking the dog is a risky business and a yellow security jacket is de rigeur. Politically, the hunting lobby is so strong that whenever someone is killed by hunters (an annual occurrence in Provence), the verdict is always 'accidental death' and the sentence usually a suspended sentence. Two years ago a woman was shot dead in my region while she was collecting mushrooms; a hunter who'd been unlucky in his search for wild boar 'saw something move in the bushes' and hoped to end his day by bagging something. He did.

The annual 'accident' victims have included a young man cycling a marked cycle trail and a little boy shot by his grandfather's gun, left lying round the house. Amongst this craziness there is a certain black humour in the incident where a hunter was shot in the woods by his own dog, who stumbled across the cocked gun.

Courgette/Zucchini

To avoid being mistaken for a wild boar, I inquired at my local mairie what a 'peaceful walker' should do. Paths in this area are often signed as open to 'peaceful walkers' (les randonneurs paisibles). Without missing a tap on her keyboard, the mairie secretary told me that the hunting season finishes in January 'and it's only small game shooting (gibier) after that, which isn't a problem.' Has she ever been shot by small bore?! I remember incidents with airguns and disturbed adolescents, and personally I'd rather not risk any projectile in the eye. As for the official advice between September and January; 'you can always phone up to find out where the boar hunts are.' Helpful. Not.

Once my husband and I were walking the dog and came across a guy with a shotgun at the start to a walk through the woods.

Us 'Is there a hunt on?'
Him 'Yes, but you can walk that way. Just make sure you talk loudly.'
We turned around.

So my kind of shooting is strictly limited to the digital kind.

Apple crumble

I've talked about writing and about dogs. My third passion is photography and in stock photography I find the  freedom to shoot what I like plus receptive, paying viewers. An icon in the stock world gave the advice 'Don't even try shooting food. The specialists do it too well for you to be able to compete'. From that moment I knew I'd shoot food. If I'd been put off by all the specialists in everything who are better photographers than I am, I wouldn't have uploaded one photo. Instead, I've been told by pro photographers, and cookbook buyers, that my food shots are good. Don't get me wrong - I know that not all my food shots are good. I still have my L plates on as a photographer. But something good happens sometimes and I know that. So in this blog, I'm going to share the way I work when shooting food.

I'm working on a request from a buyer, the same one who bought the apple crumble (see photo) so I'll go through my process step by step as I prepare and then shoot. If you want pro advice on lighting, you won't find that here but you will find some of the choices food shooters make.

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