Is there anything better (I’m talking food-wise here) than a neighborhood deli? Sure you’ve got your schmancy once-a-year places that stretch your palette and show you something amazing. You’ve got your exotic street foods, your bakeries and pubs. But in terms of an experience that grounds and comforts you, I’ll take a neighborhood deli any day.

Now I’ve definitely got a certain amount of loyalty to the Birchwood Cafe – it’s the neighborhood deli in my neighborhood, after all – but I’ve got to shout out to the Cheeky Monkey Deli in St. Paul too. Beautiful fresh bread. These amazingly airy homemade potato chips. Organic meats. It’s the good stuff.

Cheeky Monkey is my friend Sarah’s neighborhood neighborhood deli, so I called her up to see if she’d be interested in letting me take pictures of her with a meatloaf sandwich – one of the signature dishes at the deli. As it turns out, Sarah orders the meatloaf sammie every time she goes to Cheeky Monkey. Her husband Craig has traveled the menu, but not Sarah. And, as she told me, every time a meatloaf sandwich lands in front of her she makes this face:

and that’s one of the reasons she’s my friend. : )

Here are a few more photos from our lunchtime shoot. Thanks loads to the fine folks at Cheeky Monkey for their hospitality and for plating up such photogenic and delicious food. Hopefully we can collaborate again.

What’s your favorite neighborhood joint? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The magnificent Pot Roast Sandwich. Oh, the pickled onions. Ah, the horseradish sauce. . .

Last weekend I was one of the volunteer photographers at the City of Lakes Loppet, an amazing weekend-long celebration of cross country skiing – and of the great skiing terrain available here in Minneapolis.

I love cross country skiing. I got my first pair of skis when I was four or five, and every time I go out I remember shuffling around our yard, in love with the feeling of gliding over the snow.

Then, every time out, I get to the first hill and re-remember that cross country skiing is not easy. Especially if you’re going 38 km like the racers in the Loppet. It’s this combination of appreciation for the aesthetics of gliding, and the respect for the engine you’ve got to have as a racer, that made me realize last month that I’ve got to start photographing skiers. This is my first batch of images in a collection that will hopefully grow quite a bit over the next couple winter seasons. Enjoy!

In the Birkebeiner tradition

Didn't get a look at this beard after the race, but I know it was epic.

Skiers reserve their spot on the start line with their skis

Johanna Winters - women's freestyle 3rd place finisher - on the line

Poling away from the line

Two members of Team Fischer 15k in

Johanna Winters finishing strong

Here’s the full gallery for more race goodness.

2010 City of Lakes Loppet – Images by Chris Bohnhoff

Yesterday’s mail brought a copy of the February 2010 issue of Consumer Reports – I’ve got a photo in the Viewpoint column:

I know it’s a good day when I open the info for a shoot and see a word like ‘Lasermonks.’ How could that not be a fun assignment???

Turns out that Lasermonks is the business arm of a monastery in Southwest Wisconsin that sells (among many other things) toner cartridges. They kind of stumbled upon the toner business on their way to other ideas: in the process of exploring how the monastery would provide for itself, the monastery was producing a lot of research documents, Father Bernard McCoy went to place an order for more toner. He was flabbergasted by the markup on toner, and the Lasermonk idea was born.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I went to the shoot; it was my first visit to a monastery. But Father Bernard and Sarah Caniglia (the Business Development Manager aka “Monk Helper”) were extremely warm and welcoming. I had a preconception that the monastic life is austere and detached, but at least at Our Lady of Spring Bank, outside of the morning hours spent chanting and in other devotional activities, the brothers are encouraged to explore and develop their personal talents and gifts, and the economic necessity of covering the expenses of the community pretty much requires a certain connectedness to the larger world.

Many thanks to Sarah and Father Bernard for their time, for the Benevolence Biscuits Sarah sent home for my dog, and for the glimpse they provided of the Lasermonk life!

Here’s the original version of the image Consumer Reports selected, along with a couple more of my favorites from the shoot.

A couple months ago I had a chance to shoot a small assignment for Uponor – a Finland-based manufacturer of residential and commercial HVAC components whose US headquarters is in Eagan, MN. Uponor’s in-house magazine caters to a global workforce, and the piece I photographed addressed the issues surrounding moving halfway around the world to take a position in another country. That’s my shot on the right: Ulf is an engineer from Sweden who has been living in the Twin Cities for the past couple years.

The hallway where we did the portrait fit the direction I had been given really well, I thought: clean & simple, good for the laying over of text. When I scouted it I envisioned a nice natural light shot, using the row of windows running the length of the hall. Of course it was raining buckets the day my assistant TJ and I went out for the shoot, but we found a very fortuitous overhang outside one of the windows that was the perfect size for a big strobe with softbox. So we moved along Plan B: bring the sun with you! And make sure you’ve got it well-wrapped in tall kitchen garbage bags, with a couple sandbags weighing down the light stand. While we futzed with lighting, Ulf kept us entertained with tales of cross-country RV trips exploring America with his extended Swedish family. (Turns out car problems in the Dakotas aren’t much fun, but make for good stories when you get home.)

Thanks loads to Sanoma Magazines Finland for the assignment! Hopefully we’ll get another chance to work together in 2010.

I have this tendency to hang out with people who like to push the envelope when it comes to food. The kind of people who order three pizzas when in reality we only need one, just for the variety. Who order one – of each – whatever the choices may be.

People like my friend Kelly, who cackle maniacally about something like. . . the Bacon Explosion.

Never heard of the Bacon Explosion? It might be best for your health that way, but now that you’re here I’ve gotta tell you about it. First you take yourself some bacon and you weave yourself a mat. (How’s that for a start?) Next, you take some pork sausage and layer it on top of the bacon mat. Then comes another layer of cured pork – could be fried bacon, could be pancetta, whatever you got. Throw in some barbecue rub spices, a pepper or two, then roll it all up and throw it on the smoker.

The Bacon Explosion is one of those things that you know you shouldn’t do, but you can’t help yourself; you know you should turn away, but you just have to look. It is, after all, made first and foremost of the tastiest food on the planet. It’s basically pig crack.

As I learned, the Bacon Explosion makes you do some nutty things. When I first asked Kelly if he’d be up for a day of bacon and photography, he got really excited, and proceeded to spend the couple weeks until the shoot day honing his menu and refining what would go in to our explosion. When the time came, the menu for Kelly and his wife Liz, my wife Johanna, and me, included:

• Brown sugar bacon-wrapped jalapeno poppers, filled with cream cheese, coconut milk, and pineapple
• One rack of ribs
• One beer butter sauce infused whole chicken
• Twice baked potatoes (topped with bacon. . . duh)
• One bacon explosion

Everyone was more than a little incredulous about the ribs and chicken on top of the main event, but as Kelly said, “I thought the Bacon Explosion was gonna look so small all alone on the smoker.” The last thing you want to do is give the Bacon an inferiority complex.

before

after

Huge thanks to Kelly and Liz for their willingness to take Johanna and me on an epic food adventure. Kelly’s prowess on the grill and in the kitchen is perfectly matched by Liz’s good-natured response to seeing Kelly unload 10 pounds of meat for dinner. The bacon hangover I suffered the next day did nothing to take away from the deliciousness, or the experience of pushing my personal bacon boundaries.

This expression says it all.

The finished goodness

Update: in the giving-credit-where-credit-is-due department, check out the BBQ Addicts site for a look at the original madness.