Miss 604 is one smart cookie. So smart that she got me writing this post. The challenge? Write a post about the charity close to my heart, and link to her efforts towards CandaHelps. So, here goes.

There are several charities close to my heart and the hearts of my family including the BC Cancer Foundation as we have a family member who is a breast cancer survivor, the BC SPCA as there are two fur bearing members of my family and would have ten more if I had more time, but at this time of year the Food Bank tops my list.

Sitting down to Christmas dinner. photo: Simon Ogden

This year instead of buying Christmas gifts for the adult members of our family (we still bought for the little ones) my Grandpa wrote ‘Food Bank’ on a yellow stickie note and stuck it to an empty gift box; after we had finished eating the massive meal prepared by my mom, uncle & cousins the gift box was put on the table and people contributed whatever money they could to it.  For some it was $5 or $10, for others $20, but we all felt good making a group effort that would go towards others who aren’t as lucky as we are.

Being a food photographer and seeing the amount of food purchased for our shoots (and lots of it not used, go bad and/or thrown away) I must remind myself how lucky I am and that there are other less fortunate people living in my neighborhood, my city and in my country that need help not only during the holidays but all year round.

Happy Holidays to everyone,

~ j

Lots of restaurants around town, many of which are great friends of ours, are offering specials and/or set menus available for you this New Years Eve, so I thought I’d make this post a one-stop-shop if you’re wanting to eat out this NYE and haven’t made any reservations yet. But you’d better hurry, things are booking up fast!

• Bistrot Bistro ~ 1961 West 4th Ave. Comfortable and delicious french fare from Chef Laurent Devin, fabulous wines, and great atmosphere. 4 course set menu $75, only 1 table left!  Call (604) 732-0004.
  

  Bistrot Bistro

• Lux at Caprice ~ 965 Granville Street. One of Granville streets newest openings, you’ll find carefully selected menu items, tasty cocktails and chic decor. Dinner and Social Tickets: $65, includes a 4 course dinner starting at 7pm with flights of wine, finishing off with chocolate strawberries and champagne at midnight. Social Tickets only: $25, includes chocolate strawberries and champagne at midnight. For tickets or info call James at (604) 685-3189 or email info@luxatcaprice.com.
  

  Lux at Caprice

• Glowbal Grill & Satay Bar ~ 1079 Mainland, Yaletown. First seating at 5.00PM  limited a la carte menu; New Year’s Eve event seating starting at 8.30pm @ $75 ($55 for fully heated winter terrace) including 4 course menu from Chef John Crook and individual Pommery Pop Champagne bottle per person at midnight. Party until 2am. Call (604) 602-0835 for reservations.
• Trattoria Italian Kitchen ~ 1850 West 4th Ave Kitsilano. In addition to offering the full Trattoria menu, Chef Brandon Thordarson has prepared a special New Year’s Eve Platter featuring a delicious blend of ‘Carne and Pesce’ (Sliced 8oz AAA Beef Strip Loin, grilled head-on Jumbo Tiger Prawns, Gnocchi Fungi with truffle cream and sliced winter truffles, roasted brussels sprouts and freshly toasted chestnuts, Spaghetti Squash Ali Olio, chianti and veal jus reduction.  Midnight will be welcomed with a complimentary glass of champagne and canapés till 1 am. For reservations and more information call 604-732-1441.
  

  Glowbal Grill

• The Cannery Seafood Restaurant ~ 2205 Commissioner Street.  Offering two options to suit your special occasion: First Seating - A La Carte - reservations from 4:30pm to 6:30pm, enjoy dinner out before heading off to a party or event. Seating concludes at 8 pm ~ or ~ Second Seating - Gala Dinner - reservations from 8:30pm to 10:00pm, includes dinner & dancing until 2 am courtesy of a live band, party favors & a glass of champagne.  Chef Wayne Sych’s menu that night will include Ahi Tuna Carpaccio, pan seared diver caught Baja Scallop, and steamed East Coast Lobster. Call (604) 254-9606 to book your table.
  

  The Cannery Seafood Restaurant

• Tequila Kitchen ~ 1043 Mainland, Yaletown. As their last hurrah (they are temporarily closing as they hunt for a new location) their NYE menu consists of two options: Botana Sharing Platter, small sharing dishes (7 items) and a House Drink $32 pp (Min 2 ppl) ~ or ~ Full Set Menu 4 course and a House Drink $39. They will only be having two seatings, so call (604) 681-2120 or email emi@tequilakitchen.ca for reservations.
  

  Tequila Kitchen

• Somewhere else you know about? Leave the details in the comment section!

…and just in time for the holidays. I’m not sure if your family was particularly proactive at getting together over the Christmas seasons, or any holiday for that matter, but my family (despite our differences) have always managed to get together over Christmas and share a meal.  The meal being key, we really love to eat good, home cooked food. And it certainly doesn’t stop at the savory, sweets have always been huge. This week’s edition of  ‘What’s Your Favorite Fridays’ is dedicated to your favourite holiday treat, and will hopefully give you inspiration for any holiday baking still on your to-do list. Me? Shortbread, as seen below.

~ j

Wanting to make a variety of fun and tasty shortbread over the holidays, but admittedly having no previous shortbread-making knowledge except for random memory snippets of my mother baking when I was young, I turned to the only instantaneous information source: the internet. On a side note, I totally would have gone down to a bookstore, and I probably still will, but it’s a lot easier to look for these things online at midnight on a Tuesday in my pajamas.

Google search term “shortbread” got me three kajillion results, so I narrowed my search. I tried “shortbread + holiday baking” and got all sorts of fun recipes. Jackpot. It also got me a few new sites, which in addition to the tried and true recipe sites in my bookmarks and RSS feeds, I have begun to acquire quite the collection. Then I said to myself: “Self, this is definitely a blog post. Get crackin’!”

In no particular order, here are the sites that I like to visit when looking for a new recipe, be it for holiday shortbread, what to cook for 6 dinner guests, or a soup that will feed just lil’ ol me. *I also like to browse these sites as inspiration for my next portfolio or stock shoot if I have a certain regional cuisine or food theme in mind.

• Epicurious ~ great site to add to your RSS feed for a daily recipe; gets updated with new recipes more often than I can read them. Other fun things like celebrities chit chat on food topics, and holiday features.

• Wish ~ made for women on the go. has a ’search recipes’ field; offers a 20 minute Supper Club which is free to sign-up and will deliver the recipe and shopping list to your inbox; also offers topics of info on beauty, fashion and decor.

• Food Network ~ thankfully Canadian, lots of recipes to search through, and you can mosey on over to the TV for their offerings on the Food Network channel (I like Restaurant Makeover for the before & after set-up, and the episodes of The F Word, but only when Gordon Ramsey is particularly annoyed and swears profusely).

• Canadian Home & Country ~ where I found my holiday shortbread recipe; cute photos.

• Fig&Cherry ~ not only a great header photo, but nicely organized recipes; also notes which as V (vegetarian), GF (gluten free) and VG (vegan).

• Recipe.com ~ a somewhat slick looking website with searchable recipes categorized by region and course; also has a recipe of the day.

• RecipeMatcher.com ~ this is an interesting one: enter the ingredients you have in your kitchen (food and alcochol options) and it will pump out a recipe for you. (ie.: broccoli + rice flour + brown sugar = rice krispies or basmati rice. Hmm.)

Do you have recipe sites you like to visit when you’re surfing the net at midnight on a tuesday in your pajamas? Please leave the URL and what you like about the site in a comment box to add to the list!

Upcoming post: photographic results of my holiday shortbread.

Happy recipe hunting!

~ j

Welcome to our blog’s new digs ~ not bad, eh? Well we like it, and we also like that you can see so much more about us and what we do all in one place. You may prefer to still stick to just this blog page, which is totally fine; or you may decide to one day wander onto the portfolio page and see some other photos that haven’t been included in a blog post; or you may want to meander by the about page and learn about us. Well guess what? We want to learn about you too! So please, wherever you end up browsing now that everything is in the same place for you, please leave a comment on the blog page as we really appreciate knowing what our fans think, and what we can do better.

Cheers!

~ j

For this dose of creative vision, we begin the week with a favorite summer treat (or, a year round treat when you live 3 blocks from Mario’s Gelato like we do): strawberry ice cream. But don’t be fooled, this is not the edible kind. Well, technically it is edible, but I don’t think it would taste very good and I’m certain it would give you a week-long stomach ache. What you’re looking at here is fake ice cream, and it’s what is used most of the time when food photographers are shooting ice cream, unless it’s an ad for the product itself, then their job gets a whole lot harder as it has to be the real thing.

Vision here was simple, and fully inspired by the vintage green glass sundae dishes: old school ice cream parlour. Back-lit with natural light was a must to highlight the top of the scoop and shine through the glass dishes, and reflectors were needed to bounce that backlight onto the front of the set-up (one large white reflector camera left, another camera right, basically forming a 90 degree angle, with my camera poking in between).  As you’ll see below, I tried out different things with the strawberry garnish and cookie props on the table surface, but settled on 2 round jelly-centered cookies with a strawberry fan for garnish.

The beauty of the fake stuff is that (a) it doesn’t melt, (b) with the right scoop it ‘barks’ better than the real thing ~ I’ll get to that in a minute, and (c) it keeps in your cupboard forever.

Here is the recipe that I use for fake ice cream:

• 1/2 cup corn syrup (such as Karo or White Lily)

• 1/2 cup vegetable shortening (such as Crisco)

• lots and lots of icing sugar, at least a 1lb bag

*for colour: fruit (here I used frozen strawberries to get the little seeds in my final shot), cocoa or food colouring (just remember, a little goes a long way).

To make:  First, in a mixer or with a hand blender (or even by hand) mix your corn syrup and vegetable shortening together. Then slowly add your icing sugar in small doses and continue stirring. You’ll know you’ve added enough icing sugar when the consistency is dry and fairly stiff, but too much will make it crumbly.  You’ll know it’s just right because those cracks the scoop of ice cream gets when you scoop it out is called ‘barking’, and is key to making fake ice cream look great.  Fill the contents of your bowl into sealed ziploc bags and stash in the freezer overnight. In the morning you should have a rather hard ziploc bag of fake ice cream. Stores well in fridge. * I will also suggest a stainless steel ice cream scoop with the release lever, I like mine made by Good Grips.

Have you got a different recipe? Used something else that worked well? Leave a comment and share it with everyone.

Happy scooping!

~ j

Voting stops at noon today for The Best of 604: The Best of Metro Vancouver Online, and we’ve been nominated in the ‘Best Photo Site or Blog’ category so we need your vote!

Please vote for either Jackie Connelly Photography if you prefer to browse the photos on our website, or http://basilgazing.wordpress.com if you prefer our blog.

Voting is easy from here, and will only take you two seconds…that’s right, just two! Results are being announced tonight and I will definitely keep you all informed about who wins each category! Good luck to all of our fellow bloggers, and I will see you all tonight!

~ jackie

Our travels through the city’s food world for Urban Diner continued over the past 2 weeks capturing Vancouver’s bartenders and their cocktails. Some of the tasty drinks (yes, I had to sample a few) were brand new, only to be found on cocktail programs as of this week, while others are tried and true. My editor, Paul, titled the column “The Rebirth of Cocktail Cool” and these bartenders didn’t disappoint.

above (L to R): Nick Devine (Habit Lounge), Chris Brown (Beyond Restaurant), Lori Poppe (Voya in the Loden Hotel)

above (L to R): Steve da Cruz and Justin Tisdall (Gastropod), Jordan Moore (Yew in the Four Seasons Hotel), Jim Shelton (Sanafir)

Some of the shots are above; you can see more photos and Part 1 of the column on Urban Diner here, and Part 2 here. And if you feel so inclined after trying one of the yummy beverages featured, head down to the according bar (being sure to say hello to the cocktail’s creator) and leave a comment below the column to tell everyone about it!

Happy drinking!

~ j

We first were introduced to Miss Rebecca Bollwitt aka Miss 604 through Simon’s theatrezine, and since entering the blogosphere it’s hard to not run into her. Prolific, I think is the appropriate term.  She (the smart cookie that she is) began a little voting contest on her blog called The Best of 604, and this year we are honored to be nominated. Honored, and excited…woo hoo!Thanks Rebecca, and thank you to Tiny Bites for our first nomination!

Both our website at www.jackieconnelly.com, and our blog have been nominated in the ‘Best Photo Site or Blog’ category, but we still need your vote to bring home the gold!

Here’s how to vote for us…if you would so kindly like to do so (pretty please?!):

1. go to the ‘Best Photo Site or Blog’ voting page of The Best of 604

2. click ‘Jackie Connelly Photography’ if you favour our website ~or~ ‘basil gazing’ if you favour our blog

3. Please get your vote in before December 10th, results are being announced December 11th.

That’s it!

Thank you for everyone’s support, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted on the December 11th results!

~ jackie