Personal Edible Project: Mussels with Butter and Cream

Just a couple of months after meeting, I was absolutely dying to have this personal projects push through with Mylene Cheung of Photo Kitchen (watch out everyone, this girl specializes on Food Photography and she’s she’s already making waves in the industry with her beautifully lit and propped photos). Finally! Someone who wants to explore and create the wonderful and beautiful world of food & lifestyle photography. Not really sure if that’s what it’s called but it is look the Australians propagated with their seemingly effortless editorials at Delicious magazine, Australian Traveler… (hopefully, my soon-to-be trip to Sydney will be giving me a greater idea on how to do this). I also love their studio because it’s really nice and homey, although I still haven’t made a great impression on their resident cat.

Mye has a fantastic eye for the old, the beautiful and the effortless… She had all these wonderful floorboards made for our shoot that I just had to make sure I also took some of the best and fitting crockery to make this happen. For the first time, Mye and I were the clients too. We did a little research on things we wanted to write about for our blogs and things we just wanted to do, on the day of the shoot, she took the lead in the production design of the photos while I mainly just brought my props and worked on the food (hahah which seemed to be a truckload of items all over her studio). As for the food, they were edible and nothing was thrown away! Something I was not completely used to, but was absolute welcomed feeling after so many things from burgers to turkeys going into the trash can.

So without further ado, our first co-creation: Mussels

For this recipe, I basically just blanched the mussels and created a tarragon, butter and cream mixture for the sauce (I removed the tarragon after cooking the sauce for a cleaner look). You can squeeze a bit of lemon on the mussels prior to serving, but I would suggest tossing the warm mussels into the warm sauce and serving. The mussels were still alive that morning, which made them very sweet and juicy even after we’ve shot them. It’s a real great thing that Mye’s studio is just about 2 minutes away from Cafe Ysabel, it’s nice and close so the food gets to her place still looking fresh as ever.

Though I still had to style it, there was that “effort – less” or less effort on my part to make it look beautiful…the fresh ingredients just spoke for themselves. This copper plate was just fantaaaastic…i found it in our basement along with some small plates. I’m not really sure what it’s for, but anyway it was nice and old…and even if I washed it, it still looked old 🙂 Here is Mye’s take on our shoot in her Food Photography blog.

This might also be a good time to start mentioning the addresses of these places, I’ve been getting so many emails asking about where I ate, saw, did this and that!

Photo Kitchen is located in The Living Room Photography Studios Unit #2 Lumier Realty Building, P. Guevarra St. San Juan, MM. (Yes! Very near our place indeed!)

The real question now is…did we achieve “effortless”?