Lizzie

Summer Black Bean Chili with East Coast Grill Corn Bread

My cookbook photographer Lizzie Leitzell is in town for a wedding and, of course, I had to have her and her fiance Kyle over for dinner to catch up, to reminisce about our cookbook travels and to talk about what we’re working on now.

The nice thing about having Lizzie over for dinner is that she’ll take much better pictures of the food than I ever will. Hence, the picture above is much nicer than the one I would have taken. You should see the size of Lizzie’s lens.

Delivered!

Well, folks, today was the big day. At 9:30 AM I met with Lizzie, my constant companion and photographer over the past year, so she could hand over the discs with all of her pictures and the match prints (hard copies) for me to deliver, along with my manuscript, to my publisher, Artisan Books. And so it was that after we sipped cappuccino (Lizzie) and iced coffee (me) and Brendan the barrista kindly snapped that photo you see above, I journeyed south on 6th Avenue down to Houston, over to Varick and up the elevator to my publisher to hand things over.

What We Ate in Portland, Oregon

I am doing something now called convalescing which, in dictionary terms, means I’m recovering from an illness: specifically, the flu, which hit me like a ton of bricks Monday morning and kept me in bed, motionless, for 48 some-odd hours. Now I’m starting to get the twinkle back in my eye and I’m glad that’s the case because I had so much I wanted to blog about this week! Specifically, this year’s trip to the Pacific Northwest.

Strawberry Shortcake

“Whoah,” you’re probably thinking, “am I on drugs? What’s going on here? That picture, it’s so good, so professional, so unlike any picture I’ve ever seen on this blog before. What gives?!”

I’ll tell you what gives: I didn’t take that picture! (Collective gasp.) No, that picture was taken by my new best friend for the next year or so. Say hello to Elizabeth Leitzell (here’s the link to her website), the new snapshot photographer who’ll be coming along with me taking pictures of me cooking with famous chefs for the cookbook I’m writing for Artisan. Last week, I cooked a dinner for her and my book intern Tyla Fowler (the blogger behind Without a Microwave) as a gesture of good will before the cookbook work begins.

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