Easy Low-Fat Salt and Pepper Chicken, Take Two

If you are a longtime reader of Sarah’s Cucina Bella, you might remember my recipes for Easy Low-Fat Salt and Pepper Chicken Breasts. It was a long post with adorable pictures of the kids, and a bad picture of the chicken. On Tuesday, I had the chance to reshoot this recipe with the help of professionals to figure out how to take something basic like this and make it look fabulous. The photo above is the result.

When I created my (ridiculously easy) recipe for Salt and Pepper Chicken, I was clueless how to make it look tasty in a photograph. I ended up tossing one piece on a white plate and snapping a picture.

The original photo ... Would you crave that?

And did it look irresistible? Like that special, easy recipe that everyone should have in their back pocket to make when you have no time to cook dinner or when you need a lightly seasoned chicken breast for topping a salad or drizzling with an extra special sauce? Um. No. That’s the original photo at the right … See how it looked more like a bland piece of chicken? The darkness and poor lighting didn’t help anything at all. I doubt anyone gave it a second look.

As a food writer who has had to learn to shoot photographs of the dishes and recipes I create, it’s been an uphill battle. This photograph frustrated me, but I just wasn’t sure what to do about it.

Yea.

So, when my buddies (and coworkers!) at Tablespoon asked me to choose a couple potential recipes for my photography lesson with General Mills pros on my recent trip, this one topped the list. Fortunately, they agreed.

A closer look ...

The food stylist suggested turning this one recipe into a meal on a plate for better photographing. She made some couscous as a side dish, and that doubled as a way to prop up the chicken, giving it more body in the photograph. For a vegetable, we used a few carefully placed fresh cooked green beans. What a big change, right? I can hardly believe that I took these photos.

I learned so much during my training session, so I wanted to pass along a few tips for you too …

5 Food Photography Tips for the Non-Photographer

1. Don’t just pick a plate. It’s important that the color and shape of the plate compliments the food. Hold a few up to see which works the best with the colors in whatever you are photographing … or even try the food out on it first. Don’t be afraid to shoot a test shot to see which looks better in the digital realm.
2. Go small. The smaller the plate, the better your food will look — you really don’t want all that empty space around it, since it will just make the food look diminutive.
3. Take test shots. Trying to decide which place mat or napkin to use? Choose a few, and put them around the plate so you can compare how they look. Then take a test shot and whittle the linens down. Same goes for plates and other decorations.
4. Use either complimentary or contrasting colors. You can’t just choose red because you like it. Instead, consider using similar colors (such as a green napkin and plate) or contrasting ones (such as a dark brown plate and a pale khaki napkin). This will make the food stand out.
5. Don’t let the props/plates/background be distracting. Ultimately, you want the food to stand out, not the decorations that you put around it. So be sure the food is front and center and in focus (and remove anything that overshadows it).

Easy Low-Fat Salt and Pepper Chicken Breasts
serves 4

1 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts
kosher salt
course black pepper
olive oil cooking spray

Heat a skillet over medium heat on your stove. Make sure the size of the skillet will hold all the chicken.

Rinse the chicken breasts in cool water and trim away any excess fat. Place in the center of a long (about two feet) sheet of wax paper and fold the paper over the chicken. Use the flat side of a meat mallet to pound the chicken to about 1/4-inch thickness.

Cut each breast into two even pieces. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper on both sides.

Spray the skillet with olive oil cooking spray. Add the chicken to the skillet and cook for 5-7 minutes, until lightly browned on the bottom side. Flip and cook for an additional 5-7 minutes until cooked through.

Remove the chicken from the pan and use as desired.

Well, I’ve adopted a blogger. (Longtime readers may remember that I adopted Rachel from Fairy Cake Heaven last go around.)

This time I am helping out Carmen of Carmen Cooks.

Carmen is a newlywed living in the DC-area who shares her cooking adventures on her blog. She’s already done a lot of good things: creating a personalized banner, taking great photos and using WordPress. Go Carmen! She is also active in the Tuesdays with Dorie circuit.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be following Carmen and posting ideas and suggestions for her on Saturdays to help her grow her site and develop a greater audience. To start her off, I put together a list of three areas that I think Carmen needs to work on.

1. Consistency - Carmen is pretty consistent about posting about her Tuesdays with Dorie adventures, but she isn’t so consistent about posting on other days and about other topics. She should work on writing at least two non-Dorie posts per week. This way, Carmen’s audience is consistently getting more  variety to read and digest.
2. More than Dorie – No doubt, Dorie Greenspan is a baking genius. But there are plenty of blogging events to join in on, and doing so could allow Carmen to attract more readers, and keep them coming back.
3. Expand the Audience - Carmen is doing a great job on the writing side of things. It’s the perfect time for her to get out there and market herself to expand her audience. Commenting on other sites is a good start, as is partaking in web events. But getting out there and writing guest posts is another surefire way to draw readers in. With a wealth of group blogs always looking to expand their cache of writers, there is no shortage of opportunities out there.

Someone made a great analogy that privacy on the internet is like ketchup in a bottle: once you let it out, you can’t stuff it back in.

Decide early how much privacy you want to maintain. Do you want to share what city you live in? Your name? Your family member’s names? These are important considerations. Many people choose to err on the side of caution and keep all this information private at first, revealing bits and pieces later as they deem necessary and okay.

There are a number of great articles on blogging and privacy to help you. Here are two:

• Mommy bloggers balance writing and privacy @ SheKnows (by me!)
• Chewing on a blogger’s privacy @ Food Blog S’cool (read the comments)

And FINALLY! Congrats to Viktoria, winner of the Advice for New Bloggers contest – Viktoria, use the contact tab to send me your addy so I can get the book out to you.

What’s your best tip for new bloggers?

Submit your best tip between now and April 5, 2008 April 12, 2008 to sarahDOTcaronATgmailDOTcom and it will appear here on Sarah’s Cucina Bella with a link back to your site.

The entrant with the best tip will receive a copy of Sweet Melissa Baking Book.

Looking for inspiration? Check out my roundup of past tips here.

Blogging is a community, so I opened up Advice for New Bloggers to all of my readers. See below for details and the cool prize you could win by submitting a tip.

Our first tip comes from Vikoria of Cool Swede:

Nothing is too stupid to write about.

Sometimes it is the little things that people want to hear about, the things people can connect to. You don’t have to think about a topic for a week before you blog about it. The randomness can make it more fun. Think about the sitcom “Seinfeld.” It’s supposed to be a show about “nothing,” and it turned into one of the most popular shows around in the 1990s.

With this comes another advice: Don’t be scared to make fun of yourself. It shows that you don’t take life too seriously. Pick some of your silly mistakes and put a happy spin on them. (It is easiest if they happened some time ago).

It’s YOUR Turn!

What’s your best tip for new bloggers?

Submit your best tip between now and April 5, 2008 to sarahDOTcaronATgmailDOTcom and it will appear here on Sarah’s Cucina Bella with a link back to your site.

The entrant with the best tip will receive a copy of Sweet Melissa Baking Book.

A comment on a previous addition of Advice for New Bloggers sparked this little tidbit. Johanna mentioned that one of the advantages of writing on the internet is that you can pop in and edit the post if you find an error (for instance, if you used the wrong word or missed a misspelling).

She is absolutely right.

Unlike in my day job as a magazine editor, there is no such thing as “final finals” — the last, end-all, be-all proofs before we go to press. The internet is a fluid place where you can edit and reedit and edit again to your heart’s content. It’s a beautiful thing. I do it myself – and on older posts (when I was new to the whole blogging thing) as well.

It’s YOUR Turn!

What’s your best tip for new bloggers?

Submit your best tip between now and April 5, 2008 to sarahDOTcaronATgmailDOTcom and it will appear here on Sarah’s Cucina Bella with a link back to your site.
The entrant with the best tip will receive a copy of Sweet Melissa Baking Book. Check back here tomorrow for a Q&A with author Melissa Murphy.

Enter now!

I’ve posted several tips over the last few months. In case you missed any, here they are:

• Define Your Goals
• Be Comment Happy
• Use Spell Check
• Photos Matter
• Quality Over Quantity
• Join In!
• It’s Okay to Take A Break
• Don’t Stress It
• Remember the Edit Function
• Nothing is Too Trivial

I’ve told you many ways to work on delivering a high-quality, high-demand blog. What I haven’t done much of is encourage the other side of blogging, but I really should.

What’s the other side? Having fun. And more importantly, enjoying what you are doing. These things are so, so important too.

Now, I will admit that it’s easy to get caught up in blog stats and increasing traffic. Don’t stress the numbers so much though. First off, free stat programs will often not give you a very clear picture of how many visitors you’re getting or who’s reading. Second, and more importantly, these things rarely happen overnight. Be patient, enjoy your writing, and the numbers will increase.

Sometimes you just have too much going on to focus on blogging along with everything else. Work, family, and other home responsibilities can be stressful and time-consuming. When life gets too busy, it’s okay to take a break. Your readers want the best of you . . . so taking a break can be advantageous to everyone.

Recharge and then return.

And you don’t always need to tell your readers about the break (though I would recommend doing so if it’s going to be an extended break). Use your discretion and avoid making promises (I’ll be back by . . . ) because you can never be 100 percent sure that you can follow through with them.

And yes, I just needed a bit of a break the past few days. See? It happens to everyone.

One of the best things about the food blogosphere is the sense of community that has developed between food bloggers from all over the world. It’s almost like being in one great big global neighborhood of people with like interests. But as a new blogger, how do you get to know your new “neighbors”?

When I started blogging I wasn’t sure. But then I learned about food events hosted by different blogs. Intrigued, I entered a dish in a Sugar High Friday event. Then I learned about Weekend Herb Blogging and ARF/5-A-Day Tuesdays. I joined in for both. Since then, I have taken part in countless events and virtually met a good deal of great food bloggers.

So, if you want to be a part of the community, start joining in events. You never know who’ll you’ll meet.

There are two great resources for finding them: Is My Blog Burning? and Sticky Date.