And now for something completely different: a photo that made it nowhere near the book!
Raw asparagus spears soaked in blood… orange juice (with toasted walnuts and herb chevre balls) is a dish we made years ago for the blog; recreated for the LA Times test kitchen; and we wanted to go back to the well for “Salad Daze.” We tried to justify a fresh asparagus dish making a fall & winter book by slapping it at the end where an early spring dish might make sense. A total stretch.
This photo comes out of the first shoot we did in Amanda’s Echo Park kitchen. It’s a convergence of slightly wrong moves. Green and pink on black ceramic screams fusion. The arrangement looks more like MOMA art poster than a Hot Knives dish. For all these reasons, Amanda balked at including it in the book, while we didn’t get what she objected to at first, thanks to our now-famous inability to think critically about food photography (Us: awesome! looks so good! Amanda: You guys are crazy, we’d never include this.) We’ve been working on this failing. Now, during photo shoots we just scream “this is bullshit” for a few minutes to make the photographer to take us seriously.
