2011.10.16 - cream of crab soup

6 months since the last blog post...

So I have this new love for cream of crab soup. Last week after bible study we went to the Phoenix Emporium in Old Ellicott City. Jess got the soup sampler which was a cup of both of their soups, cream of crab and crab vegetable. A cup of one of their soups was like $4.95 and the soup sampler which was both cups for $5.95. Can't beat that. I ended up eating pretty much all of her cream of crab and have been thinking about it non stop.

We also split a bacon cheeseburger which was pretty epic because they get their beef from right down the street at J.W Treuth & Sons so you know the beef is FRESH and coming from 1 cow instead of 100. I ordered the burger medium and it actually came out medium.

Jess and I are going to be doing "No restaurant November" which I thought we made up but after a google search someone beat us to the punch. We're desperately trying to KILL OUR DEBT and enter 2012 debt free. So making the soup at home was a step in the right direction. EXCEPT this soup was freaking EXPENSIVE to make... all of the groceries to make it was a little over $40. The only thing we have left over is a cup of heavy whipping cream and a big thing of old bay :) The expensive part was obviously a pound of backfin crab for $17.99

I got the recipe from http://www.allrecipies.com

Here's a link to the actual recipe. Karyn's Cream of Crab Soup

Here are the ingredients and directions.

• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 (1.25 ounce) envelope hollandaise sauce mix
• 4 cups half-and-half, divided
• 1/4 cup butter
• 3 tablespoons Old Bay Seasoning TM
• 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon celery seed
• 1 cup whipping cream
• 1 tablespoon cooking sherry
• 1 pound fresh crabmeat
  

1. In a medium bowl, blend flour and hollandaise sauce mix with 2 cups half-and-half.
2. Melt butter in a medium, heavy saucepan over medium heat. Slowly add hollandaise mixture, stirring constantly until thickened. Add remaining half-and-half, Old Bay, dry mustard, celery seed, and whipping cream. Bring to a simmer and reduce heat to low. Add crabmeat and sherry, stirring gently until warmed through. Serve immediately.

A lot of the reviews said that 3 tablespoons of old bay was to much, so I did a little under 2... 3 would have been fine. I put old bay on top when I served it. I also used a 1/4 teaspoon of celery salt instead of celery seed and didn't use any cooking sherry.

The soup was great, not as thick as the Phoenix, but served fresh it was actually HOT and not luke warm, and it had a lot more crab per bite for sure. I just heated some up in the microwave for lunch and it was good too.

Would I make it again? Sure, for a special occasion, but $40 for 6 servings of soup is way to expensive to be making any time soon.

I've never really liked soups but have been really enjoying them lately. Next I'd like to make french onion.

What is your favorite soup? Leave your answer in the comments!

jim baker

2011.04.02 - A NEW BLOG POST?!!!! Making deviled eggs with my neice

Hey everyone...

I haven't blogged in 6 months and it's been a nice time unplugging. I sent out an update for the month telling what was up with us. If you want an e-mail update, leave a comment with your e-mail address and I'll get you one.

Today is my nieces birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY LINDSEY! Thursday night I drove up to their house in PA because I had to drive my sister to knee surgery the next day. Jeannie (my sister) is doing fine.

Anyway, this past Thanksgiving I was thinking of all the delicious foods I love and thinking how we should have all of these things at Thanksgiving. One of them was deviled eggs, and Lindsey piped in saying she liked them too. So I told her that from now on for every family holiday she was in charge of making deviled eggs. And at Christmas time when we visited, guess what she made. Deviled eggs!

I got the idea since Lindsey likes to cook that we should make up a bunch of eggs and try out some different types of deviled eggs. She liked the idea so here's the result.

Every good evening should start out with some little caesars pizza, this one didn't have the deep dish pizza though.... I haven't had little caesars since I lived in NY. Remember when I almost burned my house down with their dipping sauce?

Lindsey made some cupcakes for her birthday to take to school. I got to eat one before the pizza. They were AWESOME. Cupcakes are all the rage. For Jess' birthday her friend Colleen make some amazing cupcakes too. Check out Colleen's recent NYC cupcake adventure here.

Funfetti cupcakes, white frosting topped with a chocolate covered strawberry. DELICIOUS!

My sister Jeannie did all the hard work of boiling and peeling the eggs. Thanks Jeannie :)

Ingredients: hardboiled eggs

red onion

bacon?!

Here are some of the other staples. White vinegar, relish (which we didn't end up using) mayo, and miracle whip.

Lindsey starts the process, cutting the egg in half long ways.

Recently a photography teacher that taught in my photo school responded to our e-mail update and reminded me to make sure that I am not always behind the camera during family events. So I handed my camera over to my sister and let her snap a few.

Jeannie did pretty good behind the camera, she took this one of Lindsey.

Lindsey gets a little help from her mom.

Lindsey got super fancy and piped in her yolk mixture in with a bag. Not only was it a ton faster than me trying to hold onto a slippery egg white and neatly scoop the yolk into the egg, it looked a lot better.

Look how good those look! Presentation, presentation, presentation.

Lindsey and "Uncle Jimmy"

Lindsey's usual recipe for deviled eggs is her dad's recipe. This is how he makes them.

Lindsey's next recipe was only a bit different. This one added in some white vinegar, and didn't have celery salt.

This was based around a recipe I found on allrecipes.com You can see the actual recipe here. I didn't follow it, I just threw in some of the ingredients that it listed.

And this was my second recipe. I based this one off of how I grew up eating them. We always used miracle whip in our egg salad, potato salad, macaroni salad, and deviled eggs.

Jeannie, Lindsey and me!

Mike (Lindsey's dad, and Jeannie's husband, my brother in law) came home after work and taste tested them all without looking at the ingredients and could tell what was in each one. He liked the white vinegar and egg salad ones the best. Jeannie, Lindsey and I liked the bacon one the best. Cause bacon makes everything better :)

Since I was spending the night to get up and take my sister to the dr the next morning I had to sleep in Lindsey's room. I didn't wake up with Bieber fever, just a stomach ache from all of the pizza and eggs :)

Thanks to everyone who still checks in here from time to time, I was pretty surprised to look at the analytics to see that people are still checking in.

What's your go to deviled egg recipe? Leave me a comment and let me know.

Should I get back into blogging? If you think so leave me some comment love and maybe I will...

JIM baker

11.09.10 - sorry for the neglect

It stinks when this happens to blogs... they go for a while... and have a good go, and then they slowly start to fade and before to long you notice that your last post was weeks, months or even years ago...

I got a nice wake up call from a friend that sent me a message on facebook asking why haven't I updated the blog lately? Well... theres no real good excuse...

This blog sort of turned into a photography blog of sorts... it didn't start out that way but it kind of morphed into that. Now that I'm doing photography full time, I don't care to be blogging about photography on my personal blog.

So... where does that leave us?

I'm not quite sure.

I was looking at my old myspace blog the other day while searching for something to send to someone and didn't know if my life was just more interesting then or if it was more interesting because I took the time to actually write about my daily experiences.

So I think I'm going to lay this blog to rest. I appreciate everyone who has followed, and commented.

I do however think there may be a new blog in the future, maybe starting up in 2011...

Bless you guys
Jim (and Jess too) Baker

10.26.10 - the winner is...

C is the winner! Jess took C.

Seth took A.

And Jim took B.

Sorry this is late, I was on the road this weekend. Our print giveaway winner is Jeremy Wat, Jeremy you have 48 hours to email us at jim@carpediemphotovideo.com with your address so we can mail out your photo to you.

We are moving the WHOLE thing to FACEBOOK because we've heard from a lot of people that they are still having trouble voting. And also you are WELCOME to tell us WHY now but its not required.

We've gotten a couple of entries for the critique contest this week with YOUR fall pics. Keep sending them in! Details here.

JIM baker

10.22.10 - CRITIQUE NEXT WEEK with YOU!

Hey everyone, we've been asked by a couple of people to open up the critique so we ARE.

The topic is FALL.

You need to send us a HIGHEST RESOLUTION jpeg you can, (so set your camera setting to the highest resolution you can) and make sure that the photo is cropped in a 4x6 crop, so we can blow it up to an 8x12" print.

It HAS to be a photo that you took after reading this post. So no awesome pics that you took from last year. It has to have been a shot intentionally taken for this competition.

Submit your photo to jim@carpediemphotovideo.com on Tuesday October 26th by 11:59pm.

The carpe diem team will pick the top 4 and then we will post them just like we always do on thursdays and open it up to everyone else. If you win we will send you an 8x12 of the print and also a winner that voted for your pic!

We're SO LOOKING FORWARD to seeing your work!

JIM baker

10.21.10 - kitchen utensil

A

B

C

Only 3 submissions this week.

Vote by telling us which pic you like the best by LETTER and tell us WHY in the comment section.

Only votes on the blog comment section are official and you can only vote for 1 pic. Voting will end at 10am on Saturday Oct 23rd.

All of the votes for the winning picture will be automatically entered in a random drawing and the winner picked will get an 8x12" print of the winning picture!

The winning pic and print give away winner will be announced Saturday the 23rd on the blog.

Click on the word "comments" on the bottom of this post, and then click on name/url if you don't have a google account, and type in your FIRST and LAST name for us so we know who you are.

ANONYMOUS POSTS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED and only comments on the blog count!

go vote and tell your friends to vote too!!!
JIM baker

10.16.10 - lit pic winner...

This week's winner for the literature critique pic is JIM!




This print give away winner is BROOKE!

The winner has 48 hours to contact us at jim@carpediemphotovideo.com to claim their prize! Please send us your address in the e-mail.

Next weeks topic is Kitchen Utensil.

Got some ideas for themes you'd like to see us shooting? Let us know in the comment section. and SOON we're going to get you guys in on the action doing the photography so start dusting off your cameras and start practicing.

JIM baker

10.14.10 - lit pic critique

Is thursday becoming your favorite day of the week? This week's theme was LITERATURE.

Vote telling us which pic you like the best by LETTER and tell us WHY!

Only votes on the blog comment section are official and you can only vote for 1 pic. Voting will end at 10am on Saturday Oct 16th.

All of the votes for the winning picture will be automatically entered in a random drawing and the winner picked will get an 8x12" print of the winning picture!

The winning pic and print give away winner will be announced Saturday the 16th on the blog.

Click on the word "comments" on the bottom of this post, and then click on name/url if you don't have a google account, and type in your FIRST and LAST name for us so we know who you are.

ANONYMOUS POSTS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED and only comments on the blog count!

go vote and tell your friends to vote too!!!
JIM baker

and while you're at it... LIKE our new facebook page!

10.09.10 - and the winner is...

This weeks winner for the agricultural equipment/tools is JESS! D got 10 out of 20 votes.



This print give away winner is Russ Baker! (sorry no video this morning I'm on the road)

The winner has 48 hours to contact us at carpediemvideos@yahoo.com to claim their prize! Please send us your address in the e-mail.

Thanks to everyone that participated. Tell your friends, lets try and get 40 people to vote next week.

Next weeks topic is Literature.

JIM baker

10.07.10 - agricultural equipment/tools critique

A

B

C

D

Hello! Time again for another critique competition between the CARPE DIEM team! This week's theme is AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT/TOOLS.

Vote telling us which pic you like the best by LETTER and tell us WHY!

Only votes on the blog comment section are official and you can only vote for 1 pic. Voting will end at 9am on Saturday Oct 9th.

All of the votes for the winning picture will be automatically entered in a random drawing and the winner picked will get an 8x12" print of the winning picture!

The winning pic and print give away winner will be announced Saturday the 11th on the blog.

Click on the word "comments" on the bottom of this post, and then click on name/url if you don't have a google account, and type in your FIRST and LAST name for us so we know who you are.

ANONYMOUS POSTS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED and only comments on the blog count! (someone always tells me their vote on facebook, don't be that person!)

looking forward to your critiques!
JIM baker

10.02.10 - this weeks crayon winners are...

This weeks crayon critique winner is... JESS! B got 9 votes out of 22.

Jim's pic got 4 votes. Jamie's got 5, and Seth's got 4.

Check out the video below to see who the winner of the 8x12" print is!

The winner has 48 hours to contact us at carpediemvideos@yahoo.com to claim their prize! Please send us your address in the e-mail.

Thanks to EVERYONE that participated, we LOVE reading the critiques.

Next weeks topic is FARM EQUIPMENT.

JIM baker

09.30.10 - CRAYON CRITIQUE

Whats up everyone? Time again for another critique competition between the CARPE DIEM team! This week's theme is CRAYON.

I know some of you wanted to vote last week and could not because of the required google account, that has CHANGED so now everyone can vote.

Vote telling us which pic you like the best by LETTER and tell us WHY!

Only votes on the blog comment section are official and you can only vote for 1 pic. Voting will end at 11am on Saturday Oct 2nd.

All of the votes for the winning picture will be automatically entered in a random drawing and the winner picked will get an 8x12" print of the winning picture!

The winning pic and print give away winner will be announced monday Saturday the 2nd on the blog.

- JIM baker

A

B

C

D

ANONYMOUS POSTS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED and only comments on the blog count!

Click on the word "comments" on the bottom of this post, and then click on name/url if you don't have a google account, and type in your FIRST and LAST name for us so we know who you are.

09.23.10 - the CHICKEN challenge

So the Carpe Diem team has decided to get competitive. A little healthy competition is GOOD for us, it keeps our creative juices flowing.

The subject for our little shoot out was CHICKEN.

But we NEED your help. Vote on which picture you think is BEST and tell us WHY in the comment section of the blog. Only comments on the blog will be accepted as official votes.

Don't worry right now about who shot what, I'll let you know that once the votes are in. Lets see if we can get at least twenty votes! Voting ends Saturday the 25th at 10am.

A

B

C

D

Thanks!
JIM baker