The Finale: Plumtopf Rumtopf

Well we took long enough before our last addition in our mini rumtopf series. It wasn’t our intention to make this the only thing on Crustcrumbs over the past four months but here we are. We’ve been keeping extraordinarily busy over the summer and fall with barely a chance to catch our breath but thankfully, when these blue plums showed up at the market, I was able to focus my bleary-eyed attention over to them so we could put this rumtopf to rest.

These late-summer plums found under the label of blue plums, prune plums and Italian plums, not only make a satisfying deep purple preserve after their skins have bled into their flesh and preserving liquid but they also make for the ideal fruit for the lazy preserver—such as myself—because their pits practically fall out after slicing them open.

Our rumtopf is now full or our favourite summer fruits, drowning in overproof rum, and suspended in enough sugar to keep it preserved for the next 50 years—not that we’ll be keeping it around that long. Come Christmastime, when we decide to crack it open (and rest assured there will be photographic evidence) the fruit and liquor will make it into our trifle bowls and cocktail coupes. The important thing to remember will be that the mix of alcohol and sugar is sky high making whatever we use it in a deceptively evil dish that’s able to knockout anyone who dares to overindulge.

Winter Recipe Roundup

What happens when you give drunk people fire and tell them to spell.

Judging by my Facebook feed, everyone wants this winter to die a fiery death and never return. Well, suck it up, because I have more winter photos to share, as well as a reminder of the winter recipes we posted. Hopefully soon this winter will be a distant memory, and you can look back on this post fondly in October when you’ve forgotten that time when it was technically spring but still -14 degrees Celsius and snowing outside.

Also, we busted our asses in a snowstorm to take these photos “in the name of Crustcrumbs!“, so you are going to look at them, okay? Okay.

Our shooting conditions.

Winter Recipe Roundup

1. Ice Fishing & Perch Soup

For this recipe, we trekked over to Minet’s Point Park in Barrie to visit the cool ice fishing tepees. We pretended to go ice fishing to the amusement of the locals while John cooked fish on a portable grill and served it up in a soup. In a glorious display of grace and finesse, I slipped on the ice and injured my hip like a 90 year old woman.

2. Hickory Smoked Venison Shoulder

The venison was smoked on the BBQ. I made John go outside in the snowstorm to check on the meat while I took pictures through the window “for artistic purposes”. This was also my first time trying venison and it was tasty, but not as tasty as the wild rice salad John made as a side dish, which I am still obsessed with to this day.

3. Gluten-Free Sticky Toffee Pudding

We baked a cake in a wooden wine crate in a campfire (sort of). Spoiler alert: the wood crate caught on fire. The cake was still tasty, because John says it’s impossible to screw up sticky toffee pudding. Even when it’s gluten free. I didn’t take a good photo of the final product because cider.

More Pictures

Enjoy spring!

Field Trip to the Aquarium

In retrospect, it was a terrible idea to visit the new Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada during the holidays, with the crowds of horrible children pushing and shoving, and their parents sticking their iPads in people’s faces to take terrible direct-flash 0.7 megapixel photos. Nevertheless, when John suggested a field trip to the new Toronto aquarium that opened in October, I jumped at the chance. Our main purpose was to take pictures of the octopuses, in preparation for a food post about cooking octopus. (Yes, I’ve been told that’s kind of twisted.)

Sometimes, as a photographer, you approach a situation with a clear shot in mind; something that will truly capture a subject in its all its majesty:

… but instead you end up with this:

Or, this:

Nevermind the aforementioned horrible children and their parents, nor the tiny octopus tank with curved glass that distorts everything, nor the reflections, nor the lack of light… octopuses are nocturnal. We were at the aquarium for almost 3 hours, and when we looped back through to visit them again at the end of our trip, neither of them had moved. So, I ended up with the worst octopus photos in the history of octopus photos.

Luckily, John can’t fire me because I own the Crustcrumbs domain (ha HA!), so I’m going to share some other pictures of fish from the aquarium. However, fish and seafood are so not my thing, so I cannot promise the scientific accuracy of any of my captions. On the other hand, seafood is John’s thing, so if you stay tuned later this week, he’s going to write more about the edible kind of fish. He might even use their real names.

Shiny fish.

Drunk fish. Sarah took a pretty good video of these guys, who seem to just float around all day going “whoa…”

Starfish!

Colourfish! Bonus Crustcrumbs game: guess how many children found “Nemo” while we were looking at this tank?

(Highlight for the answer: ALL OF THEM. ALL OF THE CHILDREN FOUND NEMO.)

Boringfish.

Lazy shark who rests on top of the shark tunnel.

Fat sharks. (I’m not crazy, right? These sharks are pretty chubby, yes?)

They still have pretty sharp teeth, though.

Here’s a pile of dead sharks that look like rocks. (Note: not actually dead.)

Fabulous glitterfish.

HEY GUYS!

This is a stingray photobombing a picture of another stingray.

Jellyfish.

So, I may not have taken a really good photo of an octopus, but I did take an average snapshot of a stuffed octopus in the gift shop.

Stay tuned on Thursday for octopus. Cooked, this time, and much more cooperative as a photography subject.

Behind-the-Scenes: Christmas Cocktail Party

Merry Christmas! As the Santa Claus of Crustcrumbs (oh wait, no, that’s John), I’m here to bring you the greatest gift of all: behind-the-scenes pictures from our Mad Men themed office cocktail photoshoot.

The worst part about doing a big photoshoot like the one we did for our Christmas cocktail series is that I can’t post all of the images from the shoot.

Whether it’s Sara Hennessey getting weird with a nutcracker…

… or creating a cheesy conga line solely because John said “NO CHEESY CONGA LINES”, and he should probably learn by now that I’m going to think everything on his forbidden shot list is a good idea…

… or just general “pretending to be drunk” shenanigans…

… we obviously had a lot of fun doing this shoot. It was also sometimes difficult to remember that it was supposed to be about the drinks.

Because I was having so much fun, I forgot to take a behind-the-scenes photo of my lighting setup. Luckily I’m also clumsy, and I took this picture by accident:

Shooting in an office is difficult. First of all, when you’re dealing with multiple light sources, it can be a pain to balance the colour between the window light (blue) and gross fluorescent office lighting (orange). Since I knew I wanted to desaturate the images and give them a bit of a “vintage” look, I didn’t worry too much about colour balancing.

Secondly, there is stuff everywhere. Stuff casts a shadow. Since I didn’t want to spend all day setting up multiple lights everywhere, I set up just one as seen in the photo above – an ABR800 ring flash in a moon unit pointed down at the girls over the cubicle wall camera right. For a secondary light source, to fill some of the shadows and make them less harsh, I used a shoe mount flash (speedlite) attached to my camera and pointed it at the ceiling. You can read more about bounce lighting here.

The end result:

A big thank you to all five of our models and to Eagle for letting us use their office on a Sunday afternoon!

Christmas Cocktail Roundup

I was out of town last week, so I missed getting drunk with all our Crustcrumbs readers during our 5 Days of Cocktails. Allow me to reminisce with you all by rounding up all five of our Christmas cocktails.

The first beverage in our week-long Mad Men themed office Christmas party was a County Nog. The County Nog was modeled by Lynn, who later passed out under her desk.