There are always opportunities to host lavish meals at home; take in a happy hour with co-workers; have a potluck with friends; and just all around enjoy food, drink, and company…and post pics.

Ah yes, food and drink photos.

The “wait, don’t touch that dish yet” photos.  The “let’s put our drinks together and turn them this certain way” photos.

You’ve got to properly represent delicious food or drink on your blog (Facebook, Twitter, et cetera) and it sucks when the uploaded pictures don’t do it justice.  How can we optimize the way our food and drinks look?

Picturing Food? Style It.

I picked up a few tricks from veteran food stylist Denise Vivaldo one Sunday afternoon at Rosti Tuscan Kitchen.  With 20 years of styling experience and a successful book to her credit — The Food Stylist’s Handbook –  she schooled us on food styling.

Food styling is food for the camera.  Styling for a moving camera is tons easier than styling for a still camera.  You didn’t know that the quick snapshot you took of dinner that garnered multiple “Likes” on FB was actually a skilled shot.  Look at you!

Assistant Cindie Flannigan demonstrated how to arrange various pasta dishes.  The first dish they styled was butternut squash ravioli.  The ravioli was pretty enough in the serving platter it came in, but wouldn’t transfer well on camera.

Working with a smaller bowl, Cindie took the pasta out of the platter, put balled up paper napkins in the bottom of the bowl (wut?), and proceeded to build a crown of ravioli.

After arranging the ravioli, she strategically added the nuts and greens with tweezers, then drizzled and dotted the sauce with a spoon.  So precise!

Cindie arranging ravioli. Not shown, crumpled paper napkin base.

Butternut squash ravioli.

Cindie styled a couple other pastas and Denise let us in on some food styling stories and tricks.  Here are a few of them:

• Liberal use of Pam spray adds sheen to pastas and chicken
• Real cream or half and half makes a creamy substitute for milk
• Freezing a pie and then cutting a slice out keeps filling intact
• Heat guns melt butter perfectly for pancakes

Fascinating!

Throughout the lecture, we noshed on pastas and yummy Tuscano-style thin crust pizzas.  Rosti is big on local, sustainable food supplies and can accommodate vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free palates.  Reasonably priced dishes, games on TV, and contests where you can design their Pizza of the Week give this place a neighborhood vibe.

Mozzarella. Marinara. Basil. *drool* (BTW, shoot pizza piping hot as it’ll look dull when the cheese cools).

Left to right: Denise, Cindie, and Rosti owner Kevin Goldfein.

Food Styling Like a Pro

Now I’m not telling you to deconstruct your dinner at the table, but a few tips can be taken away to improve how your food photos come out.

The camera likes color, contrast, movement, and elevation.  Spin your plate and pick the best side of your dish.  If you’re shooting pasta, the camera likes waves and loops—tuck or cut ends that are sticking up.

Look at your dish in quadrants, an imaginary grid of four sections.  The camera’s eye is stagnant so you want to make sure you like what you see in each of these quarters.

Pair your dish with a proper plate—food with lots of color and texture will do with just a plain plate, simple food can get by on a more decorated plate.

Now get to cooking, food styling, and posting some pics!

Since I’m part of the Blackberry crowd, I wasn’t able to take advantage of the gracious invitation from Kokopelli to review the app.  Fortunately, Bianca over at South Bay Rants and Raves is an iPhone user and offered to share her thoughts on the app.  Thanks, Bianca!

Photo Courtesy of Hulu.com

Triple D iPhone and iPod App Review

By Bianca Avelino

The Triple D app is based on the hit Food Network show, Diners, Drive- ins, and Dives.

Launch the app and you will see a column that lists recent shows. Be sure that your location setting is on so that you can see the closest restaurants that were featured on the show.

Tap on one of the restaurants in the “Recent Shows” or “Nearby Restaurants” column and you will see a picture, a map of the location, and episode information including other restaurants featured on that particular show as well as the air date. If you click on the picture, you will find ratings from restaurant and retail review sites and Yelp. You’ll also have the option to make this restaurant your favorite for quick browsing the next time around.

Photo courtesy of Kokopelli Software.

The random feature is great for the indecisive diner in that it picks any restaurant featured on the show. However, that is any restaurant. So you could be living in California, click the random button, and be shown a restaurant in South Carolina. It would be nice if the random button could be geared to restaurants that are local to the user.

A workaround is the search option.  Searching lets the user see what eateries are closest to them by entering their city or zip code. A nice tweak to this feature would be letting the user specify a maximum distance to search from their zip code or town.

One drawback to the Triple D app is that it only features restaurants that have been featured on the show.  Unless they are traveling or planning a road trip, the app might not be of much value to fans of the show in states and cities that the show has not covered. An improvement would be to list suggested diners, drive ins & dives in locations yet to be discovered by Guy Fieri and the Triple D staff.

All in all, the intentions behind this app are good. However, a few changes need to be made before recommending it to everyone. With a few more adjustments, this app will be a go-to resource for iPhone wielding fans of the show.

OC is back with another exciting week of discounted fine dining at more than 100 restaurants.  This is the second restaurant week for OC this year.  My guess is they couldn’t be outdone by LA County which also has a round two restaurant week coming up in October.

With a wide array of cuisines to choose from and great deals on three course meals for lunch or dinner, this is a great opporunitiy to get down to OC and try something new or revisit an old favorite.  Take a friend to make the best use of carpool lanes on the freeways heading down there!

Before you go, make sure you try out a cool feature here on South Bay Foodies: our OC Restaurant Week List and OC Map.  Use this search tool to see a list of all participating locations, their price for lunch and dinner, and their city.  You’ll also be able to narrow your selection by searching on price, cuisine, or location.  With the map, you can see where each location is in relation to you and plan your trip accordingly.  Both tools link directly to menus and contact information for restaurants to help finalize your decision.

Until the restaurant week starts up in our neck of the woods, we’ll be celebrating with our friends down south in OC!

Not too long ago,  I picked up a gadget that will probably make kids and cooks alike scream blasphemy:  a bowl scraper.

Anyone that’s ever wandered into a kitchen just as a batch of cookies was being scooped out onto a cookie sheet knows what I’m talking about.  The only thing that can keep the masses calm while waiting on the cookies is licking the bowl!

Am I crazy?  Have I lost all connection to my childhood?  Have I forgotten how to have fun in the kitchen?  Or was I simply persuaded to pick up a bowl scraper because it sounded cool and cost a buck?  Two outta four ain’t bad (I’ll let you pick!).

Not Much of a Gadget

The scraper by itself is not too much of anything.  Its just a big piece of plastic with an edge.  But put that edge to work and you’ve got the makings of another cookie in the oven!

Of course, I wanted to put my scraper to the test right away.  Fortunately, I had just made my Sweet Potato Pudding which leaves a fair amount of food behind, even when the bowl is scraped with a spoon.

Sorry kiddies!  There’ll be no bowl licking here!