We serve Pulled Pork Nachos in our restaurant, but serving a dish for business requires numbers and logistics that almost always result in a recipe with constraints. The joy in home cooking is having to do whatever that comes to mind, blow up your budget of heaps of preferred ingredients without concerning yourself with customer dissatisfaction. I am most creative when I know I have the freedom of doing what I want exactly as I want it. It's this sort of planned out spontaneity as the recipe can change last minute because something pops in your head as you are making the dish...or in the case of the hero photo above, it's because several other people were involved in the preparation that by the time I saw the final plate there were bread sticks and thyme twigs scattered on my nachos!
I can distinctly remember that scene wherein I asked my friend to arrange the nacho on the serving plate because I was still busy doing another dish for the party. I instructed her to start with the nacho chips on the bottom followed by the slaw, then the meat, then the salsa, topped off with onion and chives sour cream sauce and melted cheese. I have given her the liberty to just play with the layer of ingredients that I had individually prepared beforehand. And as I was making the pasta she came to me and whispered, "Look at what your brother added on the nachos." I turned to see and rolled my eyes when I saw random stuff on it like bread sticks and sprigs of thyme. You see, my brother's concept of cooking is that as long as it looks good it'll taste good...even if it means feeding you raw chicken with beautifully chopped up grass.
Taken September 2, 2017 along one of the alleys in Asakusa area in Tokyo.
You know that feeling when you thought that all is set, then you go do a final run-through only to realize that you missed to include something really special? Well, this was the photo that I had to include in the picture book I was making. For sixty pages plus a cover and back, it took me three days to scan through thousands of photos (1964 photos, excluding the ones I had deleted) I took in Japan almost two years ago, and lay them out in an eye-pleasing fashion. I edited hundreds of photos, mix and matched the ones that looked good side-by-side, and redo a couple of pages before submitting it to the printer. It was on my third day, I just finished 60 pages of layout, and I was scanning the gallery to look for the perfect shot for my front and back covers when I came across this image. I loved it so much, with the lighting, colors, symmetry, candidness, and especially the Japanese dude staring directly into the camera right where the draw lines are in perspective...it was a perfect accent piece that I wanted to include for my inner pages. With this one photo, I ended up rearranging probably six pages just to accommodate the proper sequence and space for this photo. No regrets, even if it meant deleting one page in exchange of this. I actually deleted the only image of Tokyo tower I had in the album for this one. Why? Well Tokyo tower is probably present in every photo of every other person who traveled to Japan, but this one is a moment that no one else has captured, and it's beautiful because of that. This was the side of Japan that I enjoyed seeing most.
