Christmas brings a lot of opportunities to socialize and throw parties. Whether throwing a party of just going to one, I like to have a few things that I can cook pretty easily in case I need to host people or just take something along with me to a party.

(obligatory Christmas/Rudolph photo)

I made something the other day that’s nothing new, but I hadn’t made it in a while. It’s not a good item for the Hanukkah events that friends may be throwing, but it’s good for just about any Christmas party. I have tasted pork heaven, and its name is Pig Candy. So what is Pig Candy? It’s actually one of the easiest things to make, but oh-so-addictive and tasty. The ingredients are simple:

• Bacon. Not thick sliced or peppered
• Dark brown sugar. If only light is available, adding a bit of molasses helps
• Ground chiles. I like cayenne, chipotle and/or ancho. Ancho isn’t as hot, but is helped with a touch of cayenne.

For amounts, I start with about 2 cups of brown sugar for a pound of bacon. I mix in the chiles with the brown sugar; if I use cayenne, I use maybe 1/8 teaspoon. If I use ancho, I go with more like 1/2 of a tablespoon to a tablespoon. This is one of those things that you have to play with to see how much or little you prefer.

The oven doesn’t get preheated, so don’t worry about that. Start with a cooling rack that fits inside a cookie sheet/half sheet pan, and lay on the bacon in a single layer as tightly as you can. It will shrink up a lot, so just make sure it’s not overlapped. Then place the pan in the oven and turn it to 400 degrees F. I can’t remember why this is done in a non-preheated oven, but Alton Brown told me to do it that way, so I do!

The one change I make to AB’s method is that I turn down the oven once it reaches 400 degrees. I take the pan out of the oven, turn it down to 350 degrees F, and somewhat carefully layer the sugar/chile onto the bacon.

Once it’s on the bacon, I just smooth it out a bit. I like to put a good amount on each slice of bacon as it will melt off quite a bit, and I want to be sure to have plenty left on the bacon. Once the sugar is on the bacon, I put it back in the oven, turned 180 degrees from how it started. I then start my timing; every 4 minutes, I turn the bacon again, checking doneness. I like my bacon crisp, but even if you prefer yours less crisp, it needs to be crispy for this. I also turn on my overhead vent, as things start to smoke after a while.

I cooked this in the oven, but it can also be done on a grill or hot smoker. Once the bacon is crispy, I remove the pan from the oven and turn off the oven. Even if I’m doing another pan, I turn it off to let it cool somewhat before the next batch.

I immediately remove the bacon from the cooling rack onto paper towels so that it doesn’t stick to the cooling rack. If I’m doing more, I wipe off all the grease and melted sugar and start all over.

The end result is just ridiculous . I’ve had people at my office offer to buy more, and one person suggested I sell it as a gourmet item locally. Little do they know that it was a bunch of barbecuers that told me how to do this stuff!

Total time for this is approximately 25 minutes, though your oven could cause things to cook a bit faster or slower. The 350 degree setting is used so that the sugar doesn’t burn.

How does this become an appetizer? Pig Candy is great all on its own, but put it on a festive platter with sliced pears and brie, or figs and cheddar, or all of the above, and you’ll have a high-class appetizer that’s a bit different than anything other people may be bringing to the party.

So any of you out there trying this, if you do a variation of any sort, let me know what it was, and how it turned out.

I’m going to go on record to state that I find store-bought egg nog to be of the devil. It’s pure evil in a carton, the Beelzebub of beverages. The reason I know this to be true is that I know what real egg nog tastes like, and it is NOT that demon-concocted slime that pours out of festively decorated boxes of false promises each holiday season!

The false promises are all about people being fooled, tempted, entrapped into thinking the contents won’t lead to hellish abuse of one’s tastebuds.

Not only do I know the good side of egg nog, but I know how easy it is to make good egg nog. I only have it once a year, during tree trimming activities, but I enjoy it each year while decorating the tree in Rudolph ornaments.

Honestly, I’ve had that glop that the stores sell, with over-pasteurized whitish liquid that’s over-spiced with nutmeg. The stuff has to be cooked in black cauldrons during animal sacrifices in order to make the eggs safe… but at what cost? Your soul.

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Chez Pim is again heading up efforts for Menu For Hope.   Please consider bidding on items to help raise money for a very worthy cause.  If you’d like to see what the items are, www.chezpim.com has the list!

(From Chez Pim’s website):

What is Menu for Hope? 

Menu for Hope is an annual fundraising event in support of the UN World Food Programme.  Five years ago, the devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia inspired me to find a way to help, and the very first Menu for Hope was born.  In 2006, Menu for Hope raised US$60,925.12 to help the UN World Food Programme feed the hungry.

Each year, food bloggers from all over the world join forces to host the Menu for Hope online raffle, offering an array of delectable culinary prizes.  For every US$10, the donor receive a virtual raffle ticket toward a prize of their choice.  This year, the prizes include once in a lifetime experiences such as touring the elBulli laboratory with Ferran Adrià, dining on a historic British meal prepared by Heston Blumenthal, or joining Harold McGee on a lunch date to satisfy a lifetime’s worth of cooking curiosity.  You can also tag along with your favorite blogger on a tour of their favorite markets, restaurants, or even receive a care package fashioned especially for you from your favorite bloggers themselves.  All you need is $10 and a bit of luck.

We may never eradicate hunger from the face of the earth, but why should that stop us from trying?

This year for the 4th annual Menu for Hope, we are again supporting the UN World Food Programme.  WFP is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good.

With a special permission from the WFP, the funds raised by Menu for Hope 4 will be earmarked for the school lunch program in Lesotho, Africa.  We chose to support the school lunch program because providing food for the children not only keeps them alive, but helps them stay in school so that they learn the skills to feed themselves in the future.

We chose to support the program in Lesotho because it is a model program in local procurement - buying food locally to support local farmers and the local economy.  Instead of shipping surplus corn across the ocean, the WFP is buying directly from local subsistent farmers who practice conservation farming methods in Lesotho to feed the children there.

We feed the kids, keep them in school, and support their parents and community farming.  This sustainable approach to aid is something we believe in and strongly support.

Lesson 4 starts pushing us down the path of thinking about the subject of our photos instead of how we’ve set up our things around the subject. Previous lessons were about settings on the camera and lighting, but this time I had to actually think about what was in front of the camera.

Nika had us thinking about energy spirals. Here’s my first one, in light of the holiday coming up…

I call this one my “Spiral o’ Bumbles”. Ok, maybe not a lot of energy, but it is the holiday season, and I’m willing to bet that anyone reading these posts will be subjected to at least one Rudolph related shot per week for the next couple of weeks, and no “Bah! Humbugs!” from the blogosphere!

Ok, back the lesson…

I have something of a confession to make; the reason I think I’m drawn to learn how to take better photos is that I have something of a background in fine arts and visual presentation. I started out in life thinking I was going to be an architect, and I went to Carnegie-Mellon University to study architecture. I also worked several years as a landscape designer, where visual presentation meant a lot in getting clients to visualize designs. So I have some history in thinking about this kind of stuff, though it’s been a LONG time!

What does this have to do with the lesson this week? Not much, but it kind of sets a level of my own expectations. And I think I’m realizing that, for the past couple of years, I haven’t always thought of what was in the photo so much as what the food was, if that makes sense. If I made ribs, I took a photo of ribs. Sure, I tried to make it look decent usually, but I somehow forgot all that stuff I had once done in art classes and for project presentations. Nika’s lessons are helping me remember some of that, so I am expecting my photos to start improving.

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This is getting to be a lot of fun. Nika’s lessons are building on each other, and I already notice improvements in my photos. This week’s topic is Composition, which should start helping those of us that don’t quite put the right stuff together (I know I’ve been guilty of that). So, again in Nika’s words:

As we have been talking about technical and practical details in the first three lessons, I thought I would take us in an artistic direction with this week’s lesson on Composition.What is Composition?This is a fantastically huge topic that can not really be discussed in one post (how ever long). It is about nothing less than everything that fits inside your frame and all that is implied outside of the frame.

The human sensibility for composition springs from various physiological modes of experiencing our world which have evolved across the eons. For example, we perceive “edge” very strongly and we subconsciously infer a continuation of that edge outside of our viewable world. This would have conferred the ability to infer that a lion sat behind a bush from the small outlined silhouette of an ear at sunset. Those of us with that talent survived to have babies that did the same. Repeat this for just about everything about who we are (except for relatively modern activities like web surfing or making crème brûlée or encapsulated mango juice egg yolks).

As a consequence, a lot of how we consume and react to in a photo or other composition is deeply rooted in our subconscious and can be hard to articulate or to even grasp.

I think this is why many of us have a hard time understanding and manipulating composition. This is also why it will take a bit of practice at developing an “aware” or “open” eye to the world around us and the compositions others have made to begin to direct our own intentional compositions.

This might take some work on your part but if you are interested in studio and food photography this is a must.

Talking and writing about composition is OK but DOING good composition requires DOING. It is like zen; reading a 1000 learned books on zen gets you exactly nowhere while sitting and doing nothing gets you, well, nowhere, but in a zen way.

Right, so that might not make sense to you if you are not on the zen path but my point is that one can go much further by learning a few bullet points or First Principles of Composition and then DOING art that shows your hands and eyes how to do it instead of your thinking brain. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the review post of the third week of our Food Photography 101 series, in Nika’s words.

As was previously the case, several people contributed their results to the Food Photo 101 flickr pool.

This week’s contributors were:

• Curt
• LaRecetteDuJour
• NJYar
• Big Mill BB

As you remember from this last Tuesday’s post “FP101-3: Depth of Field”, we have been exploring Depth of Field (DOF).

Once you get the hang of it, playing with the focal plane and DOF can be fun and it can lend a whole new dimension to your images, literally.

It is used quite a lot in food photography, especially in cookbooks where food shots can be especially pornalicious and artistic. The shallow DOF can be used to focus the viewer’s attention on a particularly delicious morsel, boosting the appeal.

It can also be used excessively in some cases and some people just plain do not like it. My mom, who is an artist herself, doesn’t respond well to those photos of mine which have a shallow DOF. When asked, she can’t really articulate why she doesn’t like it but she knows that its not a style she likes. This is fine, there are many ways to communicate your vision.

If you do not like this shallow DOF style, leave a comment explaining why.

I look forward to hearing your feelings on this subject!

Lets take a look first at what Curt offered this last Thursday and then the other contributors. Read the rest of this entry »

The nominations have begun for the 2007 Food Blog Awards, hosted by the Well Fed Network.  You can nominate your favorite food blog in one or more of 14 categories from now through December 5.

Once the nominations are closed, the top five blogs in each category will be announced on December 10.  Voting then begins from that point through December 14, and the winners will be announced on December 17.

If you want to nominate a blog, choose from one of the fourteen categories and post a comment with your entry.  Keep in mind that the number of entries that a blog has been nominated has no bearing, so if you see your nomination already there, adding it again doesn’t add to its chances.  And if anyone wants to nominate my blog, I won’t be offended!