Dept. of Food Styling

As supplements editor for the Daily Emerald I have found myself utilizing all my faculties - both as a journalist, a cook and an artist. A new supplement, "Steppin' Out," drops tomorrow morning and its cover features 13 full-color cocktail cutouts and every one is a complete original.

I spent last Friday playing faux-bartender/food-stylist and it was an eye-opening experience. I quickly realized that despite some exceedingly fresh ingredients to use as garnish (the fruit was from PC Market of Choice, and I assure you that the brilliantly vivid color of the fruit garnish is accruate) the true colors of fruit juice and real liquors would never be vivid enough for newsprint. The solution was simple...Read on.

A simple $2 box of food coloring. Suddenly, (with the addition of three drops yellow and one drop red) the orange juice in my tequila sunrise looked like orange juice. Various dilutions of freeze-dried, powdered iced tea were adequate stand-ins for all manners of liquors. A little more water and you have a shot of tequila, a little more tea and it becomes Kahlua. My greatest discovery: Freezing prepared fruit garnishes allows them to be posed. This worked excedingly well for the pineapple rings (normally very floppy), the strawberry blossom for the sunrise and the spiraled lemon peel for the long island iced tea.

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