Posted March 16, 2015
Warning: This post may make you hungry.
A lot more goes into the Mariner’s Menu photo shoot than meets the eye — or the nose.
In mid February, I stopped by North Carolina Sea Grant’s Morehead City office on my way to SciREN. While working in a borrowed office, the smell of frying pulled me into the Seafood Lab.
I found Vanda Lewis, Mariner’s Menu blogger and photographer, hard at work cooking French-fried shrimp for this blog post. She does this all the time and has the process down.
First she has to actually cook the recipe she wants to photograph. Here, she is using shrimp she and her husband froze last summer.
 Vanda dips the peeled shrimp in the egg batter. |
 Then she breads them in a flour and seasoning mixture. |
 Shrimp are fried in hot oil. When they’re golden brown, she drains them on paper towels. |
This is what the whole operation looks like.
Then she arranges the food for the photo — even from behind the camera — to get that perfect image with optimal lighting.
 Vanda places the shrimp around the bowl of cocktail sauce. |
 The plating continues between shots. |
She takes a series of photos and picks the best for the Mariner’s Menu blog post.
The final results — and the recipe — are here.
For more ideas on how to prepare local North Carolina seafood, check out Mariner’s Menu, featuring many recipes from Joyce Taylor’s resource book Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas.
And the hardest part of all? Getting rid of the evidence. You can’t waste that fried shrimp.
Shrimp season, come soon!
