Delicious Shortbreads from Blue Bottle Coffee Co.

As everybody know, I’m a huge coffee nut. Though, I dont particular know much about coffee. I just love my morning joe. It must be a dark rich grind pour over. And when I heard that Blue Bottle Coffee offers free public cupping in their Oakland Headquarters, I just had to go. A cupping is like a tasting and evaluation method used as to how wine tastings work, you will find a lot of parallels between the two. I learned so much during the cupping and enjoy my morning coffee so much more.

I also wanted to try their delicious fennel and sea salt short bread because I saw it featured in Bon Appetit Magazine.

Poached egg and Olivada on Levain.

My own first article on Food Socialist.com, be sure to check it out featuring Caffe 817!

For one of the first eat-ups, this event has an amazing turnout. Everyone I met there was super friendly and we get to enjoy the diverse line of pizzas. We first started out with the extra-thin crust and moved our way up to the uber Chicago Stuff Pizza!

Foodspotting is an little food photo app (and website) where people may take pictures of their food and posted onto the internet. It’s a little like Foursquare for Food, you may easily use the app as a visual menu of your food choices. It’s currently one of my favorite things to do since I love to take pictures of my food.

A special thanks to the manager at Patxi’s for setting up a nice deal on the pizzas and Randy for organizing this awesome event!

Related Links

• BoilerHouse Restaurant
• Wente Wines
• Galaxy Desserts
• Plumeria Flours
• DJ Matt the Katt
• JMN Facebook Picture Set
• Yelp Community Blog

As those of you who follow my blog might have remembered Kelly B., she is now going off to Texas to compete for the US National Title. We all will wish her luck! Recently, I have done a photoshoot with her, we went to Alum Rock Park for this shoot.

Related Links:

• Kelly Banh’s Blog
• http://misscalifornianationalus.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/a-word-for-the-early-bird/
• Kelly Banh (Previous Blog Post)

]]> http://jamesmngo.com/site/2011/08/kelly-banh-off-to-texas/feed/ 0 http://jamesmngo.com/site/2011/07/styling-food/ http://jamesmngo.com/site/2011/07/styling-food/#comments Sun, 24 Jul 2011 03:54:03 +0000 James Ngo http://catalepsicfox.com/site/?p=3560 Food photography is such big things. One of the most important elements of food photography is the food styling. There’s so many tips and tricks when you are preparing food. Do you know that if you rinse in cold water an avocado immediately after cutting it, it will prevent it from yellowing for at least several hours. Another is the placement of the food itself and the ingredients that follows. There’s a long list, hopefully I’ll learn a good number while I work on my photos.

Brownie is a really good boy, and really wants those quesadillas!

I made some lunch the other day and though that this is possibly photogenic enough to take some pictures. So in this shot I actually went to my backyard. Brownie (my dog immediately got excite when he saw food, but I made him lay down, stay and watch me photographed it. First up, the cutting board I used was too dull and matted so I used some olive oil and wipe down the board to give the wood a nice darker tone. I laid down the board carefully onto the backyard concrete floor, then laid down the quesdillas and shot it overhead. I kept the picture slightly underexposed since I like the texture of the concrete.

Also one of my pictures featured on 500px

There’s also other ways of displaying the food. I tried plating it restaurant style. For this one I also used an old wooden table as the setting. I stacked the pairs of quesadillas and added little cute toothpicks that I bought from World Market.