Northcote Manor, Lancashire

I have never eaten in a Michelin-starred restaurant before. I kinda imaged you would need to buy chips on the way home after eating all those insubstantial little towers of food from oversized white plates. My other-half, bless her, bought me the best surprise birthday present – lunch in the Northcote Manor. When you get past the fact you could feed a smallish family for a whole week for the price of lunch here, it’s actually very good value. They are known for celebrating British cuisine, but perhaps more accurately they are able to capture the essential flavours of home-grown British produce and then turn the flavour amplifier up to eleven. It’s just so refreshing to eat somewhere where you know that you couldn’t have sourced or cooked a single ingredient on the plate as well as they do. Best of all though, you actually don’t need chips on the way home.

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4th April 2008

Oak Smoked Garlic, hand-fired pots.

This smoked garlic smells like those carefree days from childhood, where a box of matches borrowed from the kitchen draw led to secret bonfires in the woods, sheepishly returning home trying to hide the smell of smokey clothing from prying noses. I have no idea how to cook with garlic that smells like post-bonfire clothing.

30th March

Poor man's crème brûlée.

An ever changing combination of raspberries, blackberries, vanilla pod, crème fraîche, natural yogurt, maple syrup and sugar. This was the best one yet and only took about 5 minutes to put together. I won’t be trying to hold a blowtorch in one hand with a camera in the other again though.

All of these shots following the contemporary style for in-progress, close-up food photography. The informal presentation of the food is enhanced with the very shallow depth of field, perhaps slightly too shallow in some cases here. This style seems to be a good shortcut to the desired result of making the food look good enough to eat. I think it is probably much more challenging to get satisfactory results shooting product type food shots where everything in the shot needs to be perfectly presented and in sharp focus.

29th March

Dough balls and herb baked tomatos, pretty much straight from the oven.

These shots both using natural light, diffused with cloud, worked fine without any additional diffusion.

28th March 2008

This shot breaks the best practice [guidelines] I just learned for food photography – mainly as the light here is overhead tungsten lighting, which really shows in the flat look of the photo. The preferred diffused natural light was in short supply at 9pm though, plus our guests were looking at their withheld food threateningly. The [recipe] thankfully, was a real show stopper and also really quite easy to put together if you happen to have some Scottish flaky hot-smoked salmon handy.