Ah Mexican, be it tacos, enchiladas, chimichangas, burritos, quesadilla or tostadas I always enjoy some Mexican food pretty much once a week. However, for a while I have been looking for something different than the usual Mexican dish so one day I found a great recipe in Mexican Cheese Potato Soup. It is a recipe that takes the common Cheese Potato Soup and turns it into a yummy Mexican flavor soup. The soup uses a number of ingredients for the Mexican flavor like Chorizo Pork Sausage, Poblano Chiles, Chili Powder, Cumin, Mexican Four Cheese Blend, and Queso Fresco Cheese. So if you always wanted Mexican in soup form for when it gets cold out Mexican Cheese Potato Soup is a great choice.

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Mexican Cheese Potato Soup looks like most soups do when trying photograph however with the Queso Fresco Cheese added at the end it gives you something more to photo. The photo composition was an overhead view to keep it simple and focused on a single serving of the soup. With an overhead view, a good clear separation is created from the background (which is a yellow t-shirt) then the white bowl and last the soup.

For logo the focus was the imagery of a cracker in soup. The text is created in a square shape to go with the regular shape of crackers used for soup. The graphic surrounding the text has straight sides with the little bumps usually found on the edges of crackers on the inside while the outside of the graphic uses liquid outlines to give the impression the cracker is being dropped in soup.

Italian cuisine is always a favorite of mine and something I will eat day after day without getting tired of it. I love my classic lasagna but sometimes a little change up helps so a delicious option I love is Chicken Lasagna Roll-Ups. The entree follows some of your basic lasagna attributes like Lasagna Noodles, Ricotta Cheese Mix, and meat however changes it to individual rolls. It starts with one Lasagna Noodle that you spread Ricotta Cheese Mix, Shredded Pesto Chicken, and Mozzarella Cheese then roll up to place in a baking dish. Of course something like this can be customized to fit anybody’s taste like changing the meat to Italian Sausage or go vegetarian with just cheese (I actually love eating it with just stuffed with cheese).

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Chicken Lasagna Roll-Ups is a beautiful entree so getting a deliciously colorful photo was pretty simple. The main two points for the photo was to capture the yummy Marinara Sauce covering the roll and the melted Mozzarella Cheese on top.

The logo was a matter of giving a layered look which lasagna is known for but also symbolize the roll part of the entree. The text was divided into an upper and lower part that is separated by a line while to portray different layers the fonts used on the upper layer was different than the lower layer. For symbolism, a spiral was created with the jaggedness of Lasagna Noodles to mimic how the entree looks when rolled up.

 

One family recipe that has been pasted down from generation to generation in my family is Breaded Pork Chops. It is a traditional recipe for pork chops that keeps it crispy and moist. Pork Chops can dry out easily when you cook them so having a method where you can always get moist and delicious results is ideal. The family recipe uses a cooking method where you fry it on top of the stove first and then bake it in the oven. When baking in the oven, the dish containing the Breaded Pork Chops has a little water at the bottom to also steam cook the pork chops with of course a lid on the dish.

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Breaded Pork Chops is a simple dish so when it comes to visuals it comes down to a piece of meat that is breaded. So, the dish is not colorful or visually appealing but with the breading has a great texture to it. Photography came down to focusing on the one visual strength, the texture, so a close-up photo where you really see the crispy breading was the best choice.

Location of ingredients with it comes to the food dish can help decide placement of the words in the logo. Breaded Pork Chops logo uses the shape of a pork chop as the main image. For placement, the words of the logo correlated to there location in the dish with “Pork Chops” inside the pork chop silhouette while “breaded” outside since that is where breading goes. The last visual element was the dividing line created from the “k” in Pork and “p” in Chops.

 

Posting on a Tuesday, I decided I would celebrate Taco Tuesday with a taco related recipe. Taco Casserole is a different way to enjoy the taste of a taco and is simple in making. The casserole is composed of six layers with starting at the bottom is crescent roll, refried beans, taco meat, sour cream, cheese, and taco chips. One advantage of this dish is that you can customize it some to the kind of ingredients you like. For example, the taco meat at default is ground beef but you can instead use shredded beef, chicken, or shredded pork plus you can season your taco meat any way you like it best. Other places you can customize the casserole is for cheese at default is a Mexican blend but use what you like and additionally the taco chips can be of any flavor you enjoy. Taco Casserole has been a family favorite for years where we fix it once every month or two so I guarantee this is a delicious recipe.

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The goal with photography was to show ingredients and the finished product as I have done with previous designs like Chili Con Chorizo and Apple, Pear, & Cranberry Crisp. For ingredients, the object was to show what makes up the six layers for the casserole. Each ingredient was photographed in the state you would find it before adding it to the Taco Casserole dish. Then with the photos, the ingredient photos were lined up in the order of their layers with the bottom on the left to the top at the right for the final design image. Last, I plated a square cut serving of Taco Casserole and focused on one edge of the dish where you saw the ingredients oozing out. Also for the final design image, I toke in mind before and after by placing the ingredient photos at the top then the finished product photo at the bottom.

Taco Casserole was a logo I challenged myself to create a specialized wording for the text “Taco”. Taco started with a sans-serif font but using Adobe Illustrator, I customized the letters a little to give them my own unique design. The focus of my logo design was to use taco related imagery with the two I used was the image of a taco and triangles which is the common shape of taco chips. An image of a taco was created in the “O” of “Taco” that showed the taco shell with four common ingredients of refried beans, taco meat, cheese, and lettuce inside it.

Ah brownies, a delicious chocolate dessert that you can never go wrong with baking for others. However, the fun challenge is to find a bit different brownie than the normal to bake to make it an extra special treat. My special brownie is Cookie Dough Brownies; a three layer brownie with starting at the bottom a layer of your basic brownie then a layer of cookie dough and to finish it off a layer of chocolate icing on top. The added cookie dough gives you a dessert that satisfies both a craving for brownies and cookies all in one delectable dessert.

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Color-wise Cookie Dough Brownies has your brown from the brownie and chocolate icing then some light tan from the cookie dough so overall not a very colorful dessert. That is why this dessert was perfect for going with a black and white photo to instead focus on the texture of the brownie. Using a plating of three pieces of Cookie Dough Brownies, in the photo you see textures of each layer with the brownie layer crumby, the cookie dough layer a bit moist and fluffy, and with the icing you get the nice lines from when it was spread on top.

Cookie Dough Brownies is a decent size in text so for a logo the objective was a serif font with some elegance and a symbolism of the dessert. The first symbolism was creating a logo in a square shape since the dessert is generally cut and served in squares. Second, the three layers of brownie, cookie dough, and chocolate icing was the other part I wanted to show in the logo. To accomplish that symbolism of the three layers, I created a border on the top and right that starts with a thin black layer for the icing, a thin empty space for the cookie dough, and a thick black layer for the brownie layer. So as you see I also used the ratio of each layer for the whole dessert to determine how my design looks. To me it is always a goal that the logo is a good representation of the item it is for.