Joy is compiling a cookbook to include some of the zillions of recipes she has collected over the years. Currently they occupy an overstuffed 3-inch loose leaf binder. Many of them are just cut out from various printed materials and just lay loose in the binder. Others are stuffed into image protectors. Over all it is a complete mess although Joy maintains she knows where everything is. So now it is all going into a cookbook created in iBooks. The book itself is just beautiful. Everything falls into one of several categories and it is all indexed and cross indexed so it is really easy to find anything. And when using it while cooking you just have to prop up your iPad on a kitchen counter somewhere and everything comes easily to hand. Because it is all digital it is easy to search for anything by any keyword such as a recipe name, ingredient or whatever you like.

Jambalaya

The fun part for me is that I get to take pictures of all of the dishes for the cookbook as we prepare them. I have taken over the dining room with a semi-permanent food photography setup. This makes it very easy to photograph all the dishes since my lights are already setup and adjusted correctly for food photography. The setup uses two AlienBees B800s. The key light is a 36-inch softbox and the fill light is a 32-inch octabox. There is also a 36-inch white reflector in the background. This gives very uniform lighting with just a hint of a shadow for depth. I shoot tethered into my MacBook Pro sometimes but it is not really necessary since the lighting setup has been perfected through a lot of testing. All in all a fun project.