You’re staring down the rabbit hole of our “Psycedelic Rice” recipe. Just know that this photo is nowhere near as trippy as the one that made the cut, but you see where it’s going…

You will “tie-dye” your roasted beets and make a gremalata out of kiwi and habaneros. The Romanesco broc floret garnish is for fractal effect and farty flavor notes. The purple flowering kale is for its vaginal appeal. Eat with your hands. Exercise your mind…

Making a grilled cheese sandwich look ‘buy-this-book-now’ amazing is sometimes harder than grilling one.

We took two takes on our Belgian Onion Soup Sandwich. Above is the first that got vetoed. And here’s the second one that made the cut.

Both are melty and scarf-able, but ultimately we voted down that sprinkling of scallion tips as 80s-nouvea bullshit and the yellow plate as too kiddy-colored, like a big Kraft Singles. Did we make the right choice? We think so, if for no other reason than sandwich #2’s psychotic curly cue of melted gruyere.

Does soaking spices in alcohol count as a recipe? Sure does! We’ve had great success with booze-infused peppercorns and wanted to showcase ’em in the book.

But how to visualize? Pepper sitting in a brown liquid could be anything after all. Brand or no brand? First time we shot this, we opted for a little product placement nod to our go-to cooking (and party-mixer) bourbon, a $20 bottle of Bulleit. We’ve met an heiress to the liquor’s legacy at an Echo Park dinner party, so we have a soft spot for Bulleit.

In the end, it was too blatant and not so pretty. The solution, and one of our only dirty little photo shoot food tricks: the pic we ended up choosing is not of bourbon at all, but peppercorns floating in apple cider vinegar.

If it’s good luck when a lady bug lands on you, when it lands on your artichoke during a photo shoot it must mean something more. This speckled damsel alighted on an in-progress thistle inspection and was quickly snapped into eternity by Amanda.

Hopefully Mrs. Dot(com) flew on to bless a few other heathens that day, killed a few hundred aphids, got laid, laid a few thousand eggs, and died peacefully in the sun.

We’re all lucky, in great degree, to exist as we do. At that moment, as at this one, we felt, and feel especially so.

This is when it got real. Getting a morning email with this photo and recipe for our “Citrus y Cebollas” salad laid out by our designer Jen is when we nearly shit ourselves realizing this book was gonna look as sick & slick as any food porn on the news stands. Coming from the school of “point-and-shoot” (and put the camera down so you can keep the stove from erupting or the food from getting cold) this was a milestone for us.

Even this photo got reshot, however; it just seemed a little too white-plate and bright lights. The real photo of this salad, needless to say, is completely insane.

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.

This is how our Saturday morning ritual starts. Bee-line it through the farmers market, performing an obligatory price-check out of the corner of our eye, but headed straight for the Cafecito Organico stand for liquid concentration (espresso).

Shooting this last February, Amanda got a nice wisp of steam coming off a pull of their Kenya-Ethiopia-Ecuador roast.

Sipping from this one vantage point gives you a view of the whole market, as well as a line of perfect palms along Sunset Blvd., and beyond that the downtown LA skyline. It’s the scene that opens our cookbook because it’s pretty much the place we’re happiest every week.

You can’t tell from the picture, but the lady we buy mushrooms from is hot. More often than not, the selecting process for oysters, shiitakes, crimini and portobello takes a little longer than it should — the Gaze lingers a little, sentences come out stuttered.

Look we’re not creeps — but its hard to deal with wanting to score (in a strictly benevolent fantasy that may or may not include a damp soft bed of sawdust in a musty cellar) with the vendor who is where we score some of our fave ingredients.

Amanda caught this moment (sans babe) last fall when the shroom lady’s bounty was in full swing. We’ve kept our wandering eyes away from her stand of late as for some reason she has no more mushrooms and we’re a little too shy to ask her about it…

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.

In the last 30 days we’ve gone through one fluid gallon of agave nectar, a liter of molasses and two 5-pound bags of granulated sugar (not counting the several handfuls that erupted all over Evan’s car in thoroughly un-amusing red-light antics).

Quick! Check the URL, are you reading the right blog? Did you refresh your browser to twodudeslovingcupcakes.com by accident?

No, you read correctly. Hot Knives has been busy conquering our fears of the dreaded “s” word: sweets. We’ve made pies, wafers, tarts, puddings, braised fruits and cocktail-flavored pop-tarts. Our ice creams rule and our sorbet is even better. But there’s one particularly fun and brain-dead-easy sugar trick we’ve been kicking around at our summer potlucks: campfire marshmallows, without the campfire. We torch ‘em on the stove, let ‘em cool and dip ‘em in a vegan ganache with a hint of coffee beans. These scorched morsels taste like fire, coco, and caffeine all at once. And they have the power to persuade the mind that one is toasting them on a knobby twig in a national park with your boy scout troupe. Vegan marshmallows fill in just fine for your average bone-gelatin cubes, though they must be the right size and density.

Our next mission — now that we’ve conquered our fear of sugar — is to make our own marshmallows (start sharing recipes if you got ‘em). Though this seems more like chemistry class than our Home Ec-speed, we think it might just be worth it. If cranking out sweet treats means pretty strangers lick our spoons and tell us they like it, well, we’re not stopping ‘till this mission’s accomplished.

Campfire Marshmallows
(Makes 20)

A wooden skewer
20 vegan marshmallows

Kapow Coco Ganache
1 kapow coffee bar
8 oz. 64% or higher chocolatecouverture (we used Weiss Santareme)
1 cup coconut milk

1. Chop the chocolate and the Kapow roughly, and reserve in a heat-tolerant mixing bowl.

2. Heat the coconut milk in a small sauce pan until it boils.

3. Pour the coconut milk over the chocolate and wait 2 minutes. Then, starting at the center of the bowl, stir the chocolate into the milk with a spatula. Once the larger pieces have mostly turned to muck, grabba whisk and gently whip until you’e got a uniform emulsion it will be nice and shiny. Cover with plastic wrap and deal with your marshmallows.

4. Toast one side of each of your marshmallows: use a skewer (or a fork), and rotate them over an open flame until they just start to brown and catch on fire. Now dip the non burned half in the ganache and rest them on a board or cooling rack with the burned side down. Repeat and let cool to solidify. (Any extra ganache will be good for a little over a week if you keep it refrigerated. You can reheat in a double boiler for further dipping, glazing, or drizzling on willing flesh. When its coo, you can work the firm ganache into balls and make truffles, but more on that later.)

Beverage: Stone’s Cherry Chocolate Stout
Soundtrack: Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Bonnie Brown”