Logging culinary adventures

Dave and I have created an online repository for all of our cooking experiments, which you are invited to peruse at your leisure. It isn't really meant to be a blog, per se, but rather an electronic alternative to a recipe book. Most of our recipes are coming from the internet, and it is a way to have access to our own experiences and recipes from a kitchen anywhere in the world. We also have a fun DSLR camera and enjoy photographing the delicious fruits of our labor.

Finally, we use the kitchen as a bit of a laboratory. Like America's Test Kitchen, we really enjoy thinking about the small changes and tweaks that might improve (or catastrophically ruin) a dish. The science of it all, I suppose. We also quickly forget the lessons learned with each dinner, and are constantly asking ourselves "What Was it We Did?" Hopefully this will help.

So, if you are so inclined, feel free to track our progress at whatwasitwedid.blogspot.com

Finally getting some winter!

I've been working remotely (the perks of academic life!) in Oxford over the last several days, in time for the first proper winter weather this season. I have an open-ended ticket back to Cardiff, so technically I could stay a while longer...  However, I will likely get a train sometime tomorrow and get my nose back to the science grindstone before my boss returns from his honeymoon. I did get a "reader's card" here in Oxford though, so I can work from the beautiful Bodleian library and Radcliffe Camera when the mood strikes.

These are two pictures from my daily wander around town with the new camera. The camera is an excellent pet: it encourages you to go for walks but can actually come with you when you travel. Both pics are very cropped down from the original image, but hopefully any change in image quality is undetectable. I've noticed that I have a weakness for Oxford's many walls and gates, which are featuring heavily in my miscellaneous albums. The more moss and rust the better! Pheasants on said walls are just icing on the cake.

Playing with Photography: Baby Steps

Dave and I are still getting used to our new camera... it is definitely smarter than we are, for the moment. With every YouTube tutorial we watch, with every book we peruse, we get a little bit more comfortable with the gazillions of options provided by our little Nikon. But, ultimately, I sense that most of our education will be from taking pictures and then looking at them.

With that in mind, we're trying to take the camera on little walks around Oxford, to get some "exercise." Dave lives right on the Oxford canal, and it is a glorious walk up to Port Meadow, a large expanse of free land where anyone can let their horses and cows graze. Grass can't get any greener.

Even with our photography education in its infancy, pictures do just "look better" with the D5100. It could be a placebo effect, I suppose, wanting our expensive investment to bear fruit, but I think the colors are instantly more vivid and the focus much sharper than anything I could achieve with a little point-and-shoot. I'm enjoying the flexibility I have with choosing what is in focus, and obviously also what isn't in focus. Already we talk about wanting different lenses to play even more with this depth-of-field idea, but Dave and I have made a pact to not invest in any new lenses for at least six months while we really figure out what we're doing.

And, just in case it looks like only I am holding the camera and only Dave will be in any pictures, I promise that we do trade off from time to time! Here is me being silly in Dave's kitchen:

These aren't full size images, so please click on one for a more impressive view of all pics in this post. I'm going to probably dump all our photography play into one Picasa web album where people can check out the full photos if interested. Hopefully tomorrow I can head out in the snow (the UK was just gifted with a few fluffy white inches) and get a bit more practice in! Suggestions, advice, criticisms, encouragement all welcome as I try to make better pictures.

Oh heyyy there

Dave and I have a new toy! Meet George, our Nikon D5100

 Once we wrap our heads around how and what to photograph, we'll provide some eye candy.