Mariner’s Menu: Behind the Scenes

By E-CHING LEE

Posted March 16, 2015

Warning: This post may make you hungry.

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.

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.

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!