Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Very, very good looking dish. I made something like this years ago from some obscure cookbook and was dying to find something like it again.

If it's as good as it looks, you deserve a pat on the back.
Scott

I love Italian ices and shared them with my children. Too bad all that is available is the knock offs... I made a post about our treat on my blog. Fell free to take a look :D
Scott

Looks very tasty. Very well done!

No flash, certainly not. The distraction level is high. I've heard that someone prone to epileptic seizures may be affected by the flash output. Same with migraine sufferers...

For food photography, I think it depends on what you're doing. Casual, "hey look at this" pictures can be done on my iPhone. With the 3GS, it's probably easier.

For more serious stuff, I break out the DSLR. High ISO when needed, and a fast lens. Since I'm so close to the food, I'll use a 50mm. If the restaurant is lit with ambient in the daytime, I'll use a lower ISO. I keep a little pocket tripod with me, so I can attach it to the camera and rest it on the table.

Lastly, modern cameras have lots of megapixels and good low light sensitivity. Scaling down a shot at, say, 1/25 second at ISO 800 with some noise to 400 pixels wide should be suitable for a blog post...
Scott

All of these recipes sound so professional! I'm not sure if the $5 special uses anything exotic, though. Soy sauce, cornstarch, some kind of oil, and definitely garlic.

There was a place that I used to eat at on 7th Avenue and 30-something Street in NYC (they've since closed). Their brown sauce was the most addictive. I used to buy some on Friday nights to take home and eat on Saturday.

Their brown sauce probably had a Herculean amount of MSG in it. Whenever you ate there your heartbeat would race, you'd be agitated easily, and your energy level would increase. I ate there for a month straight one time and had to withdraw myself slowly.
Scott