About
Photo by Lauren Martin
My name is Jennifer Hess, and I love food.
I love preparing food, enjoying food, sharing food with others. I love writing about food and taking photos of food, and for ages I have said that I didn’t want a food blog, but here I am. If you look at my photostream on flickr, and see what the majority of my photos are - photos of what we cooked and ate - then it seems obvious, really, that I would have a blog about food. There are so many food blogs out there, though, that I just wasn’t sure that I should add my voice to the mix. I wasn’t sure I had anything new or interesting to contribute. I’m still not sure.
But I do want to write about food. I have received a great deal of positive feedback from the cooking pieces I have contributed to gastronome, ChronicBabe.com, and more recently, to the print publication ShojoBeat, and that has only reinforced that this is something I should be doing. I’m hoping that writing here will help me hone my craft.
Inspiration
Both of my parents cooked, and I ate lots of great meals at home growing up, but my biggest influence has to be my Grandma Hess. She’s a wonderful cook, and she prepares her meals with so much love and thoughtfulness that the humblest ingredients become something really extraordinary. When you eat something she has prepared for you, whether it is a plate of migas she has just whipped up or a steaming platter of tamales she has worked on for days, you feel special, nurtured, loved. I hope I’m that sort of cook someday.
Cooking at Home
When I started this blog, my husband and I lived in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Moving to the city and experiencing its food culture was eye-opening, to say the least. I was continually amazed by the variety and quality of foods that are available in New York City, and it was a real treat to take the raw ingredients we got from our favorite purveyors and make something tasty with them.
We moved to Providence, Rhode Island in April of 2008. We have a larger kitchen and a great space for grilling, and we have already begun to explore what Rhody has to offer in terms of food and dining. So far, I’ve been impressed, and Mike and I are both looking forward to future food adventures.
The Photos
I started photographing meals I had prepared as a way of cataloguing what we ate at home (and on some occasions, to catalogue memorable meals out). I rarely cook strictly from written recipes, preferring to look at them for inspiration and then add my own spin, so having a visual reminder of what a finished dish looks like is helpful to me if I want to duplicate it in the future. When we do eat out, I tend to take notes. I find trying to recreate a restaurant meal at home to be a fun challenge.
To my husband’s occasional chagrin, I like to spend a little bit of time before each meal on presentation and plating. I believe in the adage that you eat with all of your senses, and if I can put something in front of my dining companion that is as beautiful to look at and smell as it is tasty, I think I’ve done something right. I think when you start with beautiful, high-quality ingredients, the presentation should do them justice. Sometimes that means that Mike has to wait a few minutes longer before taking that first bite, but I think bringing a pretty plate to the table makes for a better overall dining experience.
I am not trained in photography, and I will readily admit that I have a lot to learn… but you know what they say about practice. I am currently using a Sony DSC-H2.
Philosophy
The two most important books I read in 2006 were Nina Planck’s Real Food and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I had begun to focus on eating better several years ago after being diagnosed with a chronic health condition, and as my husband and I have family histories of certain health conditions that are affected by diet, eating mindfully and healthfully is a focus that has continued to this day.
I have tried many different ways of eating over the years, spending seven years as a vegetarian, eating super low-fat, low-carb, you name it - but eating a wide variety of minimally processed, whole foods has been the best and most satisfying way of eating that I have experienced. Buying local, sustainably produced foods whenever possible feels so much better than buying big boxes of low-quality food from a big box store. I am well aware that not everyone is in a position, financially or otherwise, to eat the way we do. My grandmother had to feed seven kids on very little money, and I am pretty certain that when she could afford to buy chicken, it wasn’t certified organic. But she didn’t feed them nuggets and neon-orange macaroni and “cheese” either.
My husband and I certainly do not eat a “perfect” diet all of the time. We aren’t the kind of people who will refuse to eat something someone has prepared for us because we don’t know the exact patch of soil it was grown in, or how humanely the chicken in a dish was treated before it became part of our meal. We try not to be food snobs. I have a long-standing addiction to Sapporo Ichiban miso-flavored ramen, but I do try to make it an occasional indulgence. I readily admit that I would be lost without boxed low-sodium stocks (though we do make our own whenever possible) and canned beans (though I do rinse them well before using them). We try to make the best choices we can when we are the ones in control of our meals, and the dishes I discuss here will hopefully reflect that.
Enjoy reading, and feel free to comment or email me at lastnightsdinner@gmail.com