Sometimes the search for good times and original images leads you to some unexpected places. Last Sunday, the search took me and a hearty band of food lovers to an interstate rest stop one hour northwest of Minneapolis. Why? Well, have you ever seen photos of gourmet food mere yards from an interstate? I hadn’t either, so I thought I’d fill that gaping void.

None of this would have happened if not for the involvement of Asher Miller, Executive Chef, Wolfgang Puck’s 20.21 Restaurant. The challenge I posed to Asher was to come up with twists on traditional road trip dishes and prepare them on the road – practically on the roadway itself, as it turned out. To my continued amazement, he accepted the challenge, and invited some friends and family along for the ride. So what did he come up with?

• Watermelon cubes with feta crumbles & balsamic
• Deviled eggs
• Local cheese plate, featuring blueberry & raspberry cheddars and aged gouda
• Tuna carpaccio atop crostini with citrus greens
• Mini burgers on homemade buns
• Grilled quail
• Potato salad
• Assorted Surly beers

The food was incredible, the weather perfect. Judging by the smiles in the photos, I think the lesson is that a well-crafted piece of food can drown out quite a bit of road noise.

One more thanks to pass on, and that goes to Rachel Sherwood, food stylist extraordinaire, for her invaluable help wrangling props and making Asher’s delicious food look its best.

I’ll be posting my first behind the scenes video from the shoot in the days (weeks?) to come, so stay tuned!

A few months back I shot a story for Food Management Magazine profiling Jean Ronnei, the Director of Nutrition and Commercial Services for St. Paul Public Schools. I met Jean at one of the public schools some portraits, then I stuck around to photograph a {gulp} lunch hour. Yes, it was a melee.

When I think of school lunches I remember back to some pretty bland, mediocre stuff: the most basic of dishes, with the bare minimum of fruits and vegetables. So I was surprised and heartened to learn more about what Jean’s got going in St. Paul.

Menus have expanded to offer dishes representative of St. Paul’s diverse population. Efforts are made to source ingredients locally. Student helpers scrape food waste into compost bins prior to sending the trays to the dishwasher. As I don’t have kids myself I’m not really up on the state of school food programs in general, but what they’ve done in St. Paul gives me hope.

Not only that; the lunch ladies were super nice.

Some images from the story:

When I first met Stefan Meyer it was late Spring and he was a few weeks away from kicking off the inaugural season of Growing Lots, a pretty unique urban farm located in my South Minneapolis neighborhood. Back then, Stefan told me the general premise of the farm – take an abandoned and unwanted parking lot in an industrial part of town and turn it in to a farm selling produce to local markets and restaurants, and CSA shares to neighborhood residents – and I knew I needed to photograph his progress. As often happens to start up businesses, Growing Lots has worked through some tweaks to their original idea in order to get the process rolling, but the result is a place that’s even more interesting that I had expected it to be, which is a testament to Stefan’s creativity and dedication to the concepts of urban farming.

I’d definitely recommend checking out the Growing Lots Blog for all the details about what Stefan is up to. It’s inspiring. The general gist goes like this: you hear ‘farm’ and ‘abandoned parking lot’ and you assume that the black top has been ripped out, right? Nope. Stefan is creating beds right over the top. The original concept of covering the whole plot with soil in one swoop didn’t work out, so he’s been going little by little, adding on to the main bed as he’s ready to plant more seedlings. He’s also experimenting with these ingenious planters (made of tomato cages, straw, and soil clocking in at about $1.75 each to construct) that hold an incredible number of plants for such a small footprint.

Mostly by chance, I stopped by on the morning of the farm’s first CSA share pick up day. Here’s Stefan harvesting some kale for one of the CSA boxes.

Hopefully I’ll have a chance to stop by in a month to check the farm’s progress. As the early season greens are harvested, late season things like brassicas and melons are just sprouting up, and I’m excited to see what the farm will look like as Stefan finds more ways to innovate and pull food from the urban landscape.

Portrait of a true urban farmer:

I love me a good reuben. Are you with me? The tang of the pastrami, the sour of the kraut and the sweet of the russian dressing, it’s a beautiful thing. I decided last month that I needed some behind the counter photos of a real deli, and visions of reubens were what spurred me on. And while there is definitely room for debating the best pastrami in the Twin Cities, my long standing favorite is The Brothers Deli, downtown Minneapolis.

The Brothers has been around for a long time, in several incarnations; I remember eating at one in Southdale Mall when I was a kid and my mom was a secret shopper for Dayton’s (speaking of old school). Regardless of the location, The Brothers has always been the kind of place that serves bowls of pickles on the tables and slow roasts its pastrami and corned beef on the premises. Which is the only way to go when it comes to a deli, as far as I’m concerned.

I talked to Jeff, the head brother, by phone a couple times to set things up – telling him that I’m a big fan, that I’d love to shoot some during a lunch rush sometime. Our two phone conversations lasted about 15 seconds combined (Jeff’s clearly a guy who has 14 hours of work to do in an 8 hour day), and next thing I knew my assistant TJ and I were there ready to shoot.

Jeff’s crew is a well-oiled machine. All of his employees have been with him for years – many for more than ten – and they know how to get a lunch rush fed. As I tiptoed around everyone, it kind of blew me away how calm everyone was, even though the line was out the door and down the skyway for much of the lunch rush. Each person had their station, and everyone knew exactly what was needed. It was beautiful to watch.

Salad station

Soon-to-be Corned Beef Sandwich

The Grill Captain

Jeff surprised me by asking if I’d be interested in shooting some food shots to put up on the walls of the restaurant. Based on our amazingly quick phone conversations I figured he would have his head down and would forget about me a minute after I was done shooting. But as it turns out, my photos now hang over the deli bar and behind the counter, and there may be more coming shortly. You gotta love it when personal work turns in to paid work.

Next time you’re in the skyways, keep an eye out for a two foot by three foot reuben floating over The Brothers deli bar – that’s my work. Sweet!

My wife Johanna gives me grief on a regular basis for not taking more pictures of our life. She gets incredulous about the fact that, on the one hand, I’m a professional photographer; on the other hand, I hardly ever document family events.

I don’t have much of a defense, and as of right now I’m going to make a half-resolution to be better about it. As a warm up, I’m delivering a couple photos of our breakfast.

Last month Johanna and our friend Carrie decided they needed to make marmalade. Which prompted Carrie’s husband Anders and me to decide that that would require scones – to provide something to put the marmalade on. Now, for the past month, our two households have been on a little bit of a scones race. Not a bad development at all.

Anyway, these are the most beautiful, fluffy scones I’ve ever made. So beautiful that they forced me to use the cooling period to document the occasion. Here’s to home cooking, Saturday morning deliciousness, and to pointing the camera back on my own life in ‘010.