melissas produce

As you can imagine it takes lots of food to write and photograph a cookbook/cocktail book. Since our new book, Latin Twist: Traditional and Modern Cocktails includes freshly squeezed fruits; Vianney and I knew we were going to need help in the produce department. We reached out to Melissa’s Produce and they generously agreed to be our produce sponsor and sent us boxes and boxes of fresh produce for our first photo shoot. Thank goodness I have an extra refrigerator in our garage. I also set up a table in the garage for some overflow. My garage smelled like a tropical paradise with all the exotic fruits.

We shot photos for two days and went through lots of the produce supplied by Melissa’s Produce. We shot the photos in my home — no fancy studio, no team of assistants, no fancy equipment — it was just the three of us. While Vianney was shaking up cocktails in her handy-dandy mason jar, I was styling photos with my collection of props as well as props that Vianney brought on her road trip, and Jeanine was concentrating on the photography. We all had our jobs and we all worked great together. In between cocktails we were making edits and notes to our recipes while sipping (ahem) I mean testing the drinks. We would also take short breaks and search the internet looking for inspiration. We were either looking for cocktail garnish ideas or styling ideas on Pinterest, or searching YouTube for ways on how to open and peel certain produce.

drink props photography

After the photo shoots I had some leftover produce and decided I wanted to make a few videos of some of the produce we were curious about. I was actually inspired to make this video after I saw this lovely video by Alejandra Ramos. Before I saw this video I used a potato peeler to peel kiwis and would always make a slippery mess. This technique is easy and fast. So the next time you need a kiwi in your cocktail, smoothie, or fresh fruit salad, try this cool technique.

Thank you Melissa’s Produce for supplying us with such lovely produce for Latin Twist: Traditional and Modern Cocktails.

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Written by Yvette / iPhone Photos / Video by Pure Cinematography