Our dishes are now film stars!
A few weeks before Christmas we were invited by a Colchester-based TV video company to provide dishes for a food tasting session for their staff Christmas lunch. They liked what we cooked and booked us to cater for the lunch. Then, out of the blue, the company called us with an emergency just 10 days before Christmas.
They had a filming session booked to produce a TV ad featuring a variety of very high quality dishes that would need to be filmed at various stages of preparation but also to be edible so that the actors could eat the food while filming.
The storyboard was written, the script planned, the studio was set up and the actors were booked, but at the last minute the company they usually used for these jobs let them down.
Could we help? Yes we could!
Plainly, as people were actually going to eat the food and be filmed doing so once it was cooked, we couldn’t use any of the tricks or props that are sometimes used to enhance appearance when filming food, such as using Vaseline to simulate beads of water, under-cooking so that the food stays firm under hot lights or mixing real with fake food.
Gathering ingredients and our wits, we rushed over to the studio, where during a very full day we prepped and cooked a whole range of seven different dishes. Each was filmed throughout the process, from raw, to semi-prepared, to cooked and half-eaten.
It was a very long day, but we did it – and there were no complaints about the taste of the dishes we’d prepared.
In fact, in addition to catering for their staff dinner a few days later we’ve been booked to cater for four more events for them.
Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson watch out – there are some new “celeb” cooks on your trail!