Welcome to Magic Marinade! I’m Anand, hello; I’m a graphic designer (or a communication designer, in the broader sense) and I live in Bombay. I’ve been involved with various degrees of culinary experimentation since I was little, but my endeavours have gotten more focussed since I started living by myself (and cooking for myself). I started documenting these experiments in a Facebook album sometime in 2010. Over the course of three years, the album grew into a set of nearly eighty over a thousand photographs and recipes, some of which are my own.

The seed that eventually grew into this website was planted back in 2012, when I looked at all the pictures and recipes I’d collected (and upgraded to Android and Instagram). I couldn’t think of a name then, so I let the idea marinade in my mind until it was ready,  this recipe happened. A month later, Magic Marinade was born.

And then there was Instagram

Food blogs have been responsible (to quite an extent) for elevating the overall standard of food photography in the internet over the past few years. Whether it’s full frame cameras or entry level DSLRs, there is a certain sensitivity to lighting, framing and lensing that has contributed to a lot of exquisitely beautiful food photography online. In some cases the subject is elevated to a level of aesthetic professionalism where the viewer would assume it to be unachieveable and choose to be a voyeur more than an eventual attempter of the recipe.

With phone cameras becoming increasingly better and the advent of Instagram (which helped iron out the little issues of noise and colour that phone cameras tend to have) there has been a certain democratisation of artistic photography. Anyone with a half decent smartphone can now shoot and share images that don’t look like they’ve been shot with a webcam or pin-hole camera.

The pictures on this site are all taken on my windowsill (where the light it just perfectly diffused), with my phone right after I’ve brought them out of the kitchen. The backdrops (if any) are usually my bedsheets. I have about four of them, which you’ll all be getting very familiar with over the course of your viewer-ship. The point being that this is something you can do, and probably should.

I started The New Vitruvian Man a few years ago to talk about design, food and music, particularly with the idea of talking about the basics of cooking and spreading good music that I’d come across. This site aims to do the same with an assortment of good food that anyone and everyone can attempt and then show everyone else.

To quote Molly Wizenberg (a.k.a the Orangette):

“I hate the notion of a secret recipe. Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared – that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed. To stop a recipe in it’s tracks, to label it “secret” just seems mean.”

This is now an open-source universe; learning new things has become exceedingly easy. Food blogs, shows and books have amped up the quality of the food we’re creating and consuming and have also led to better attitudes towards things that are local and healthy. So pick something you like here or go to the grocery store and pick up all that is in season and cook something nice.

And then tell everyone (so that some, if not all, might just do the same).

This website is typeset in

Futura PT

&

Garamond Premier Pro.