Sausage supper and some thoughts on photographing food

       There are some days when food just needs to be easy and quick and grilled sausages with fried onions and a salad are the perfect.

       The sausages are from a deli called Iago on Princes street, they use to have a stall in the English market, but the new shop is bigger and brighter. The sausages are specially made for them and the thick meaty, fennel and garlic ones are our favourites.

       We are still eating onions we grew in the garden last year, sliced thickly and cooked slowly in some olive oil with a seasoning of salt and pepper, they make a soft bed to put the sausages on. 

The salad of fennel and orange is one of our regular winter salads I blogged about last February, its sweetness complements the onions and to stop it being over sweet we add a good squeeze of lemon juice. It is particularly nice when made with blood oranges. The fennel gives a crunch amongst all the softness.

       I tweeted about this supper the night we ate it, but I didn’t post a photograph. Someone questioned if it had happened, in a joking way, and I said I’d been too hungry to take a photo and that I thought people would be sick of food photos after Christmas. Anyway I like to take a good photo of the food, to do it justice. I did take the photo below the next day of the leftovers.

Leftover sausage supper.

       So is it important to take a photo or just enjoy the moment of sharing the food?

For me cooking and sharing the food is more important. Sharing food is what makes us friends and friendship keeps us connected to other people. In reality very few dishes are photographed and posted on social media considering the number of meals consumed around the world each day.

We are lucky to have food and more than enough.

       When I do photograph my food it is usually for a blog post here or as an aide-mémoire when eating out. I do my best to make the images interesting, informative and in focus for here, but when we are eating out they tend to be a quick snap so I can recall each of the elements on the plate and quite often they are not perfectly in focus or they will have a shadow of the camera/phone in them. As in the one below.

Octopus and black chickpea stew.

       The eating out photos are useful to help me create new dishes at home by maybe bringing in an element that was particularly tasty or for seeing whether a flavour or texture go well together or not, all these add to our everyday meals. Very few of which are ever photographed.

       Do I need to share more of these, I don’t think so. I write this blog to keep my hand in at writing and as a way of recording what’s around me here. 

Thank you for reading this.