Cooking and Taking Pictures

Finally! This week, I got to cook all of the recipes for my main article as well as take pictures of everything that I made. Although I thought about trying new recipes for my magazine, I ended up making breakfast meals that I have made and loved in the past so I knew how to make all of the recipes that I made this week. Before starting to cook, I made sure that each of the recipes had unique health benefits that could set them out from any other breakfast as I am making a healthy food magazine. When taking pictures, I made sure to take more than one so I could see which one looked the best. I also kept a notepad where I was cooking to keep track of everything I did. These were the techniques I used that I learned from my previous research.

The first thing I made was the acaí bowl. I started out by laying all of my ingredients to make it. They included a bowl, a blender, frozen berries, honey, acaí puree, a banana, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and coconut flakes. After that, I started making the masterpiece. I blended the frozen berries, honey, and acaí puree together until it was thick and well blended. The machine that I used to make it was a Nutri Bullet blender but any type of blender would work as well. I used a bowl to put the blend in before putting the toppings on it. The toppings I used were sliced bananas, raspberries, blackberries, coconut flakes, and blueberries. When I took out the coconut flakes, they were a little bigger than I expected so I crushed them up before putting them on top of the acaí blend. I put the toppings in a row to make them pleasing to the human eye and look mouth-watering. I then put berries, coconut flakes, and a spoon outside of the bowl so the background of the picture was not plain. Lastly, I took pictures of the final product.

The second thing that I made was the peanut butter and granola apples. I was planning on putting a chocolate drizzle on top but the chocolate that I was going to use was coming out of the bottle too fast so the drizzle would not have looked like one if I included it. I first took out a cutting board, apples(green-granny smith and red-gala), creamy peanut butter, and plain granola. Crunchy peanut butter could have also worked, it would have just been harder to spread onto the apples. The color of the apples doesn't matter either, the cook can choose whichever they prefer. I chose to include a variety to show that they both work. I sliced the apples, spread creamy peanut butter on it, and sprinkled granola on it. At first, my aim for the sprinkle was off so the granola that went onto the cutting board I ended up picking up with my hands and sticking it to the peanut butter. I then arranged the apples onto the cutting board in a formation that looked neat and organized before taking pictures. 

The third thing that I made was the avocado toast. When I took out all of the ingredients, they included a pan, two pieces of multigrain bread, two eggs, a tomato, an avocado, and everything but the bagel seasoning. Since there was a recall on California avocados, I made sure that the one I bought was not from there. I cooked the two eggs over-easy(one after the other so they didn't get stuck to each other), cut the tomato into slices, and laid out the bread on the plate. I then mushed the avocado onto the bread until it had the consistency of a smear. After that, I put the sliced tomatoes and the egg onto the bread with the egg on top of the tomato. The last thing I did was sprinkle the everything but the bagel seasoning on top. I put the carton of eggs, half of an avocado, and a tomato behind the plate so the background had texture to it. I then took pictures of the final product.

For the table of contents picture, I decided to use healthy things I had in my house to lay out and take a picture of. First, I used a dipping dish to put olive oil and vinegar into and green and black olives around. Next, I cut zucchini and peppers to also be put into the picture. After that, I took triscuit crackers and put them into a cluster. Lastly, I took the picture for my table of contents. I made sure that it was a vertical picture so that it could be on one side of the page if I decided to make my table of contents one page or be split into two pages if I decided to make my table of contents two pages. 

After making all of the recipes and taking pictures of all of them, I have decided that the acaí bowl would be the perfect cover image. It is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and can draw attention to my target audience.