What’s Stu Cooking

I’ve started a new weblog for posting my random musings. Some of you might remember Brain Stew, my first attempt at keeping a blog. Things have changed, I haven’t gotten any less lazy, it’s just that blogging just got a little bit easier (see Tumblr).

Brain Stu 2.0

First an apology. I didn’t intend to let this blog slip from my habits, but hey, it happens. I’m not going to beat myself over the head with a soggy turnip over it.

Part of the problem, i think, is down to the format of my posts. It takes up a lot of my time to photograph a dish and then write out an entire recipe. To get myself back into the habit I plan to give myself more freedom in what I publish, so I’ll be posting more than just recipes, in the future.

For example, I might just post a few lines about what I had for dinner one night. This kind of micro-blogging is catching on with formats like tumbler and twitter. The beauty of this format is that it makes publishing so quick and easy that it’s hard not to post. But the danger is that you could end up spitting out garbage that no one really wants to read. Hopefully I’ll find the happy medium.

Oh, and check out the new search feature on the right. It uses Google Custom Search to search only sites chosen by me, so you know that you’ll find a good recipe. For a partial list of sites that are included see my foodie links page. This site is included of course .

The other week I rigged up a photography studio at home for shooting images for this site. I only spend a few quid too. It consists of:

• a desk lamp with a translucent plastic sack over it to defuse the light
• large sheets of coloured card from a stationary store
• white pieces of cardboard to use as light reflectors
• a bit of folded cardboard that stands a little over 1 foot or so tall to hold up the card
• a few clothes pins for clipping the card and reflector on to the cardboard support

The light is not perfect so a tripod is needed and the card is too small for shooting anything large, but for an hours work, a few scraps and less than £40 spent it’s not too bad.

The photo above is fillet of wild caught sockeye salmon, left raw to show off the wonderfully red flesh. This salmon is best when planked which means to grill it on a cedar plank. Fantastic!