Saturday, October 15, 2005

Anybody Got a Laminator?

I've had an enormous amount of fun learning to use the new highish-end camera I bought in July.
Sometimes I just get lucky and a wonderful picture happens. Other times I work and work and work, until I get something semi-decent. I spend hours pushing buttons and reading the (impossible) manual. I shoot test pictures, I tinker with white balance and ISO (and yes, Dr. Biggles ― I realize I'm supposed to buy a light and a tripod and get a kid to stand in the sink).
But sometimes dinner is at dinnertime, and these days, dinnertime is getting darker and darker, and there's just no good natural light, and too high an ISO gives you a grainy picture, and I've got the wobbles and the focus suffers (and autofocus is notoriously unreliable in poor light anyway)...
Well, last night I just said to myself: Bite the bullet. Use the flash. (I hate the flash!) I wasn't going to get any kind of picture without the flash, though, so I used the flash.
So here's what we did with the taro root and the great fresh tofu from Basic Soy: A stir-fry of chopped leeks and shredded Brussels sprouts, with minced garlic, a knob of ginger (which one of us forgot to look out for and chomped right into it, and it wasn't me, but I'm not saying who it was), diced white eggplant and a sploosh of oyster sauce... topped with sauteed taro crisps, and they were fantastic, and I'm making taro crisps again real soon.
And here's the fun part: It wasn't authentic Chinese cooking, but I sure got an authentic-looking Chinese menu-style picture out of it.

4 comments:

Guy said...

You go, nothing like food to make the day go well.

Biggles

Farmgirl Susan said...

'Get a kid to stand in the sink?'

Oh thank god your word verithingies are easy tonight.

cookiecrumb said...

Oh, sorry about the verithingies. (I have no control over them!)
Don't you know about the kid in the sink? Here: (scroll down to the bottom)

Farmgirl Susan said...

OMG that was hysterical.