A Cookbook Rabbit Hole
Is where I've been
Thank you for being a paying subscriber to Susanality. Your support means so much to me and helps keep this newsletter going! If you enjoy this post, feel free to forward it to a friend who might love it too.
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind! I did the longest cookbook shoot I’ve ever done — TWELVE consecutive days! The cookbook was for the chef and Food Network personality Michael Symon, and this was the third cookbook I’ve worked on for him. I’m sure some of you are fans of Michael already, but if you’re not, you should be! His food is delicious and he is the real deal. I don't do as much food styling as I used to, so I have even more energy to devote to special jobs like this one. It was not nearly as tiring as I was expecting, which I attribute to the fact that we had a great team, and we all really enjoyed working together. (Soft wood floors helped too!) Having fun definitely takes the edge off of hard work.
We shot an average of eleven recipes a day, sometimes with variations. It would not have been possible without a tremendous amount of organization up front. I had the shots for each day mapped out in advance (it took me two full days to do this) and we had a mega shopping list. Every four days we would shop for produce, meat, and fish. The thing I haven't mentioned is that these were not exactly Q&E (quick and easy) recipes. Many of them took quite a bit of prep and time to put together, so it was essential that we really had our act together!