Through winter it is always best to have a number of different soup recipes on hand so you can rotate between them over the cold months. A good chowder that is oh so tasty plus cheesy is Cheesy Corn Chowder that can help anyone stay warm in the winter. The chowder has a nice thickness with a great cheesiness to it but does not stop there with greatness since has a little bacon in it for an increased delicious taste. As the name suggest it has corn as the main vegetable but additionally it has potato, onion, and carrot so has that great healthy goodness to benefit from eating. This chowder is a bit similar to a Potato Soup with some of the same ingredients so if you’re familiar and love Potato Soup you will probably love this chowder as well.

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A photo of a chowder is not really too informational on what it is or what is in it since in general you will see the chowder with some hints of ingredients. So, I had to work with the chowder a little bit to get enough ingredients floating at the top so you get a more interesting and colorful photo of the item. Composition was best with an overhead shot since the photo was going to be used with the logo. Planning ahead for design elements is crucial since if I did not take the right kind of photo for the design then I would be stuck cooking the chowder again and then retaking photos in the right composition. A first step I always do for any design project is to brainstorm and plan what I am going to do and what kind of design I will be creating. This plan becomes my guide to follow from step to step like taking the right photos of the item to selecting the right font to creating symbols for the logo along with other parts.

The logo has two purposes this time to reflect the product and have enough content to show the photo through. So to meet all challenges step one was to use a clean thick font for good logo composition and enough black area for the photo to appear in. Since the length of the words varied it created an open area to use as black space for the photo to get maximum amount of the photo visible. To improve the logo and give it a unique touch an image was created of a soup ladle pouring the chowder with some ingredients visible like corn, carrots, and bacon. In the end, all challenges were met with a simple and clean logo and visible photo of the chowder.

Thanksgiving is around the corner so getting ready to fix the traditional dishes for friends and family starts to come to mind to prepare for. One of the most common traditional sides is your mashed potatoes and gravy so thought it would be ideal to share an ideal variation on mashed potatoes. Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes is a delicious side dish that as the name suggest can be made ahead of time like a day or so when it gets close to serving time all you need to do is bake it in the oven. So, this can be a great side if you have a lot of items you are fixing and need to find a way to space things out to make it a bit easier to cook all in time. One thing to note, this is a gravyless mashed potato side but makes up for it with ingredients that give a delicious creamy taste. The mashed potatoes are mixed with sour cream, cream cheese, butter, and a few seasonings to give some flavor then you top it with cheddar cheese, bacon, and green onions so what’s not to love. So if you are looking for a very tasty variation on mashed potatoes then Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes is something worth trying.

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A first step was how to photograph the item perfectly since if you left it as is you see the layer of cheese, bacon, and green onions but not much in mashed potatoes. The best result was to mix the top layer with the mashed potatoes and place it in the bowl with a bit of a swirl form. Food not might always look the best at first glance for photography so sometimes work with it a little so that it can be presented as great as it taste. The background of the photo was brought to you by a brown T-Shirt since the color had good composition with the dish.

Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes was an interesting title to figure out what was the best way to make it into a logo. The focus for design was to symbolize the “Make-Ahead” by creating a circular object with an arrow. The words were placed inside the circle at different sizes to fit properly then given a slight angle for a bit more interesting layout. Now to add the logo, the idea this time was to insert the logo as if it was actually on the bowl. So the logo was edited by skewing, blurring, and changing opacity to make it look like it was part of the photograph instead of digitally added afterwards. It is a neat effect to do but you have to take in mind the composition of the photo otherwise it will not be believable.

A classic ground beef entree is meatloaf which is common for most people to have had at least once in their life. I first had meatloaf when I was young but never really liked it or would have a taste for it. Meatloaf to me was always a big dry piece of ground beef that I needed ketchup to enjoy to a certain degree. Luckily, I found a recipe to change it up a bit to where now it is something I enjoy on a regular basis. Cheddar-Stuffed Mini Meatloaves with Chipotle Glaze is a great meatloaf recipe that changes up the usually meatloaf form to something quite tasty. Instead of one big meatloaf, the recipe has you create mini ones for individual serving then takes it one step further by adding cheddar cheese inside and a chipotle glaze on top. Chipotle is generally a spicy ingredient but the amount of the spice added here is so small that there is no spicy taste but if wanted can add more of the spice in the glaze when needed.

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Cheddar-Stuffed Mini Meatloaves with Chipotle Glaze is a very yummy looking dish so step one was to get a photo showcasing just that. Placing a few mini meatloaves on one plate, I focused on one for the photo where you saw a good layer of glaze plus a small hint of cheese oozing out. Decided it was best to let the photo sell itself so did not do anything special to the photo in a photo editor.

The logo was a long one so went with a horizontal bar layout so that I could fit all the words and some space to work with. First step, the words needed a bit interesting placement than just from left to right so grouped them into three areas. The left area was for “cheddar-stuffed”, the middle for “mini meatloaves”, and the right for “with chipotle glaze”. The middle area was the most important so gave it a little personal touch so that it was a bit more eye catching. The word “mini” was smaller to reflect the word and to line up perfectly with the “M” in “meatloaves” by being the same width as the “M”. The other main point was the “O” in “meatloaves” where the “O” was removed and instead a mini meatloaf graphic was created and used.

Baking Time! Exercising my baking muscles a little, I baked an Apple, Pear, and Cranberry Crisp to use some of the fruits in season. In general, a crisp is one fruit but wanted a bit more flavor and different so lucky I was able to find that. This tasty three fruit crisp dessert can be enjoyed warm and possibly with a scope of ice cream on top when necessary. Making this dessert is not too difficult with the main thing to do is make your topping which is a nice sweet streusel then your filling which is mainly just fruit when both are made place them in the pan and bake.

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With a title like Apple, Pear, & Cranberry Crisp, the name already gave me an idea of how to layout my design and what photos to take. With three fruits meant three ingredient photos to help give the visual of what is in the crisp. So, I had to setup my ingredients to get a good photo before using them for the recipe with also placing them each in a place with good lighting. Apple and Pear photos focused on one good looking product with others behind it to give the background in the photos some substance while cranberry was focused on a group of them. With ingredient photos done it was time for the main product photo, the key here was to show the crisp with some of the filling showing. So it became a matter of plating it just right where the top streusel topping stayed together and get the filling to be oozing out on one side so you can see that in the photo.

Layout and logo composition was to be the exact same where the ingredient photos went top to bottom in the order apple, pear, & cranberry just like the words in the logo. For the logo, each fruit word also was given a matching color to what is usually associated with that fruit so apple with red, pear with green, and cranberry with maroon. Course the main word to focus on is “Crisp” since that is what defines what type of dessert this is so is given a big font size and a hand writing font style. A last little touch for “Crisp” was to do the color association again with focus on the streusel topping color which is light brown.

As it gets colder and colder during fall and winter the need for a good soup to keep warm is always important. A yummy and tasty soup option that I like is Gnocchi Chicken Minestrone. Using Gnocchi turns this Minestrone variation into a nice dumpling soup to enjoy. It can be a bit time consuming since there are a number of vegetables and couple meats to chop up but it worth it in the end so just get the cutting board out to get chopping. Regularly for garnish this recipe uses asiago cheese and basil but just from experience in serving at most the cheese is wanted and the basil is left unused so have on hand what you feel is going to be used for a garnish.

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When having photo editor software, a photo can be edited to remove and replace parts of the photo. The original background was a white marble but wanted to change it up with using fall colors and a patterned background. So step one for doing something like that is to create a layer mask to use on the image where the area selected in the mask will appear while everything else is hidden. Now doing a process like this is easiest when you have simple geometry shapes for your selection which is exactly what I had since the soup bowl was a circle. If you have more complex shapes and lines to follow for the mask selection then you could be at it for a while to accomplish so plan your photo out first if you plan to do a process like this in a photo editor.

The pattern background was applying a color layer with a pattern overlay at a low opacity so that it looked like the pattern was of that color. Additionally, a shadow layer was created since as you notice that the color of the background darkens the farther away from the soup. A last little touch for the background was the layer mask for the photo was edited to where the original shadow for the soup bowl was still in there even with the new background. Photo editing is a huge undertaking to learn and do that is why there are books and whole courses on how to do it but once you get the hang of it, it can open up new options for what you can do with your photos. For logo this time around, the main goal was to be part of the background so used a font that worked well with background by being of a decent thickness. The same pattern for the background was applied to the logo to keep similarities then to give it a little prominence a drop shadow was added.