How much beautiful food photography is actually found in the dishes and setting? Every time I take these close-ups of meals I’m making there’s something not exactly appealing about them. Just as I’m writing this I figured it out. When we are traveling and I take extreme close-ups of our faces when we are at some beautiful location, you’ll only see the pores and blemishes of my skin, not the ocean, forest, or mountains around me or Caroline next to me. We gain the context of being at an iconic place when we see the bigger picture. When ingredients are photographed as a bunch of elements of a recipe it is not a dish of food, it must be contextualized with the props that we associate with how we’ll approach the dish when we eat it. This feels so obvious now that I’ve wondered about it for a second but the first photo I took of my porotos Granados looked horrible.

Porotos Granados is a bean dish from Chile. The main ingredients are cranberry beans, butternut squash, fresh corn, tomato, onion, garlic, and marjoram. This is our 9th bean dish since I announced our culinary journey to Beanistan back on June 23rd and with 29 varieties of beans still in our pantry, we are far from completing our travels into the world of beans. I can’t tell you how these turned out as I only scooped a small portion from the crockpot for the sake of taking this photo. They remain simmering until dinner time. Then, before you know it, the late afternoon rolls around and those lamb chops that have been marinating all day in rosemary, garlic, lemon rind, and olive oil are on their way to the grill. Paired with the beans we are once again astonished at our good fortune to be eating so well, staying healthy, and enjoying our time.

Bean verdict? These are brilliant and will certainly be on our menu plan again in the future. Caroline is thinking they’d also be nice with some andouille sausage while I was thinking maybe some Filipino longganisa.