Girl+Fire Turns 1 With A Top 5

Today is the day marked in all the Girl+Fire calendars as the day this site was born!

It's been a lovely year of experimentation in the kitchen, learning the ins and outs of food photography (an ongoing process), how to style food, and getting to hob nob with some of the coolest food bloggers in Los Angeles, the FBLA.

I'd like to thank all the readers and Facebook fans for your support, and hope to give you more and more good stuff!

To start, how about a retrospective? Here are the Top 5 Moments in G+F First Year:

5. Surviving the first Chopped-Inspired Dinner. Luckily the gathered friends and family made it easy. And we now have a running joke about Kevin Bacon and shrimp shakes (see the video here).

4. Learning the very simple art of canning! This was so much fun, and completely cured me of my fear canning. Which then led to my next favorite blogger moment...

3. Making sweet and spicy poblano jam. What happens when you add blueberries to jalapeños and poblano peppers? DELICIOSITY. It's a new word. I loved this jam so much, it's one of the few G+F recipes you'll see on both the blog and the calendar.

2. Meeting Chef Aarón Sanchez on my mom's birthday. He is such an incredibly nice guy, and we had the greatest time that evening.

1. The absolute highlight of the year, however, was being voted top pizza among the gathered food bloggers at Rosti Tuscan Kitchen last April. Getting to meet everyone who's blogs I'd been lurking on, and then having them pick my pizza was mind blowing.

There are, of course, plenty of other memorable moments. Finally getting to meet Oakley at the OC Foodie Fest AND learning her bacon scotch recipe—which was later featured on BaconScotch.com!!—are just two of the many.

Thank you all again. It's been hectic, heartbreaking, and wonderful all rolled into one!

Food Styling with Debbie and Cindie

Last November, before the holidays and craziness of starting a new job, I was lucky enough to join a bunch of food people at Rosti (scene of the Pizza Pie Win of 2010) for an afternoon with the lovely ladies of Food Fanatics, Denise Vivaldo and Cindie Flannigan.

What. A. Great. Time.

Denise and Cindie are both experts in their field, but on top of that, they are genuinely funny, down-to-earth women. Their enthusiasm for food styling is infectious. And even though Denise stressed the days are VERY long for a stylist, they clearly really do love what they do.

Pointing out pictures in her new book The Food Stylist's Handbook, Denise gave away all the secrets about how each shot was crafted. Pancakes were sprayed with sealant so the butter and syrup don't seep through. A blowtorch was used to crisp chicken skin to just the right shade of brown. As she talked, Cindie was busy building camera-ready plates from some of Rosti's menu items. A plate of ravioli gained height from the assistance of wet paper towels propped under each piece of pasta:

A standard plate of ravioli

Building the shot

The beautiful final product

We learned about layering the dish, making food look delectable, using herbs judiciously to add color. I think of it like us woman use accessories: to "dress up" the plate.

Here Cindie built a plate of spaghetti, a notoriously difficult food to style because of the chaotic look inherent to a pile of noodles. Denise emphasized that it's important that the plate not look too "busy".

The ingredients and tools

Cindie dressing the plate with sauce

The delicious looking dish

It was such a fun afternoon. I've since had the opportunity to read The Food Stylist's Handbook and it is a damn good book. In it is everything you ever wanted to know about the industry, from how to pack your kit (which no food stylist would ever leave home without), an honest, no-holds-barred take on what is required to make it as a stylist, funny anecdotes taken from their years in the field, up to step-by-step instructions for styling everything from cake to turkey, soups to steak.

Pick your copy up at Amazon. And follow the ladies on their blog Food Fanatics Unwashed.