OMG.. I was strolling the net earlier today looking for something totally unrelated and found a website about food designing. I wanted to crawl through the screen and grab everything on the plates because they were absolutely stunning! Talk about orgasmic food!

I read somewhere once that a food designer is an artist who doesn’t cook but can REALLY make food look good enough to eat.

Well, Linda, the food designer, does it for me. After looking at those photos I don’t care if she CAN cook. I could eat it if it tasted like cardboard if it looked that good.

Do you have trouble plating your food so that it looks as good as it tastes? Sometimes I have real win and other times I am reminded of a saying my father said when something on the plate looked less than appetizing: “Anyone who’d eat that would eat shit with a rusty spoon.”

Okay, my apologies if that offended anyone, but hey, that’s what he said. He was a pretty finicky eater and from Maine where it was meat and 3 veg twice a day. Nothing out of the ordinary — not even pizza.

Back to fancy plating for food blog photography. I have been told that photographing food is nearly as difficult as bathing a cat but I’m willing to give it a good shot. I bought a light tent so I won’t have any glare in the pictures – and then I read a woman’s blog that said, “Always take your photos outside and you’ll never have to worry about lighting.” Now she tells me. Her photos are always stunning so I think there’s merit to what she says.

I want my photos to show the texture and the color and have them make the viewer salivate and want to cook what’s on the plates for him or herself. So watch for better photographs or increasingly better photographs here soon.

Got photos you want to share? If you’ve got some good ones, post them in the comments and tell us how you got the photo to look so good. I need all the help I can get.

Doesn’t this look good? Can you imagine yourself feeding your lover this delicious treat? I sure can!

You’ll need:

16 oz of milk or dark chocolate (in chips or chopped)
1 1/2 Tbs shortening
1 pound of strawberries (make sure they have stems and leaves)

Melt the shortening in a double boiler over slowly simmering water. (use a metal bowl over a saucepan if you don’t have a double boiler) then add the chocolate. Do not overhead your chocolate or it will seize up and have to go in the trash. When about half the chocolate has melted, you can turn off the heat and stir, stir, stir until the chocolate has cooled just enough to dip.

The best way to dip the strawberry is to poke a toothpick in it, dip the strawberry and then stick the strawberry in clay or styrofoam to harden.

If you want to be really clever, you can melt some white chocolate in the same manner and drizzle white lines on the chocolate strawberries.

Enjoy!