Signs of Spring

So I think my recent enhanced interest in food photography is dwindling a bit. I'm not sure what sort of kick I was on in the first place... I started out thinking it would be a neat idea to use the photos as a reference to go along with our menus that we still have yet to make... but then I realized it might be a bit tedious in the long run. I'm not sure, I might still do it that way, because it's always nice to have a mouth-watering photo of the meal when planning? Let's just say that's the reason I was so adamant on getting photos of every meal.

I still got a few photos though, not nearly everything, but I'm also only taking photos of the foods/meals that we actually prepare with some effort, not the kind where you just take pre-packaged food out of a bag and cook it. We had an amazing steak and mashed potatoes (with sweet white corn) tonight, but I didn't catch a photo of it.

This past Monday, I noticed that we have a cherry blossom tree right outside our house! This is the first time it has bloomed since we've lived here and I love cherry blossoms, so I was excited to see it. And of course, first thing I do is run inside and grab my camera to get some photos. The sky was bright that day so these are the best close-up shots I could get.

Oh and I also got this shot of the sidewalk running along the front of our house...

Those flowers are so NOT pretty in person, but given the right angle, they made a pretty picture.
So now on to the rest of my food photography from this past week:

I was actually pretty proud of these pizza-shaped cheese quesadillas that I made. Food-wise and photo-wise. They were better than I normally make them, plus they look good in the photos as well. (to me, at least!) The side of sour cream may seem a bit odd, but ever since I worked in a taco place way back when, I always dipped my quesadillas in sour cream, although those usually had chicken in them too. That just stuck with me, I guess.

Next, a simple breakfast one morning -- scrambled eggs with toast:

And cheese nachos. I pretty much just put this together one day for lunch because nothing else sounded good and I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time cooking anything. A plateful of tortilla chips and shredded colby jack cheese and 45 seconds later, this is what I had.

Small snack of granny smith apple slices drizzled with a caramel topping sauce from Smuckers. I washed each piece off with water before pouring the caramel on, so it appears a bit too watery and kind of absorbed into the apple, but it was still good.

And this last series of photos are from today's banana bread baking experience (it was my first ever). We tend to buy more bananas than we actually eat, so when some of them turned VERY ripe, I wanted to find a use for them, instead of wasting them by just throwing them away. So I found this simple and easy recipe for banana bread. I tweaked it slightly by adding some chopped walnuts in the batter, plus adding a very thin layer of dark brown sugar + more walnuts on top.

Ingredients used.. mainly taken to help me make sure I had everything I needed.

Right before being put in the oven to bake for an hour.

Fresh banana bread!

It made the house smell SO good!

It tasted SO good! I can't believe I've been missing out on banana bread all this time. Now I'm kind of hoping more of our bananas will turn brown soon so I can make another loaf! Haha.