A world where kittens can bake cookies

A picture may be worth a thousand words. But it is not nearly as much fun as cartoons can be. This is something Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell readily agree with.

The brother-sister duo run a blog called They Draw & Cook, where a bunch of artists cook up cartoons to enhance the effect of the recipes.

As they explain on their blog, “Nate and Salli came up with this idea while on a family vacation. Nate was trying to recreate a favorite dish — fettucine with figs in a balsamic butter sauce — while Salli sat at the counter with her watercolours painting a crate of figs. This led them to realise how much fun it was to actually illustrate food.”

They got so excited that they wanted to publish a book right away, only to realise that they did not have enough recipes to justify a book. So Nate put together the blog which invited artists from all over the world to express their passion for food.

But aren’t pictures really important for blogs and books based on food? “Illustrations can tell stories in a way that photos can’t. Illustrations can be funny or sentimental or create an idyllic scenario and environment. You can’t quite show a sweet kitty baking cookies using photography! Or find a chef with 10 arms to make your meal. Sometimes a beautiful watercolour rendering is so much more delectable than a photograph,” says Nate.

There’s no dearth of colour on the blog. And the illustrations certainly attract attention. But artists can sometimes stress too much on the visual rendering of food instead of the recipes.

A search for an Apple Pie recipe, for example, yielded an illustration that was attractive but said nothing beyond, ‘Apple Pie — featuring apples with their friends, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour and a bit of lemon juice, partying in a pie crust at 375 degrees Celsius for 45 min.’

Nate agrees that illustrating recipes can get challenging, especially with artists from around the world contributing to the blog.

“Every now and then a recipe is submitted that seems ambiguous or needs a little bit more clarity so the readers aren’t too perplexed when they try to make the dish,” he says.

But according to Nate, specifying quantities for each and every ingredient is not always necessary.

“Salli tends to illustrate ingredients that ‘play well’ together, meaning flavours that are tasty when tossed together; amounts don’t matter so much here. But when baking, you really do need to know exact amounts of things and oven temperatures and times, or you can end up with a big pan of mush,” he says.

But he also doesn’t want to compromise on the fun factor, “We hope readers don’t become too frustrated by the lack of information in some recipes. Go with the flow and give Google a go if you need to know how long to cook rice,” he adds.

The effort has paid off for Nate and Salli. They Draw & Cook will get published in book-form and hit the shelves this coming October. Needless to say, the journey has been fun and fulfilling.

Says Nate, “Recently, an artist named Charrow told us that TDAC inspired her to write a children’s book. Another artist told us that TDAC inspired him to start a new blog dedicated to jazz-related art. Now that is what it’s all about!”