Countdown to ‘Salad Daze’

In twenty days, our first cookbook comes out. “Salad Daze: The Hot Knives Vegetarian Cookbook” focuses entirely on fall and winter vegetables, with both vegan and vegetarian recipes. We are giddy with pride and grateful to our friends who helped us with it.

To celebrate, pump ourselves up and, hopefully, drum up some commercial urges in you to go buy this sucker, we will be posting a photograph every day for the next 20 days.

These are photos that (for whatever reason) never made it to the page and ended up on the cutting board. They are untouched, unedited snap shots from the camera of our friend Amanda Marsalis, who shot “Salad Daze.” They are insane. They include produce porn, goofy behind-the-scenes shit, and pics that just didn’t quite make the cut. We hope this makes you lick your lips. We hope this makes you march to your nearest independent bookstore (or Urban Outfitters, they’re selling this!) and throw down the equivalent cash you’d pay for decent meal on our elbow grease. Trust us, it’s good. Hold us in your palms. We want you to feel it.

Out Cut #1. Above is our cover shoot in Evan’s kitchen. It was the last thing we shot for the book. We roasted and peeled vegetables, splayed them out on the table, set up the flash, and stood drinking a weird mix of Italian amaro and seltzer while Amanda shot and our good friend Scott rearranged the tools behind us on the pegboard until it looked right.

Dollar figure for the veg: $160. Number of flannel shirts we tried on between us: 6. Minutes of shooting: 45. Money shots: 2, and we couldn’t choose between vanilla and illicit so one made the back cover. Knowing that in less than a month 20,000 clones of our first born will be in shops across (and beyond) the boundries of America: (fucking) priceless.