Verified answer

You're right, that does sound boring. But you can add a few different situations to spice it up a little.

Let's use a serving spoon as an example - you could include shots of it lying in the drawer, a hand digging it out, placed neatly on the set table(all shiny and clean), in use inside the dish, in use over somebody's plate, lying with the last few crumbs of food in the dish (all messy this time), being carried back into the kitchen, sitting in the dishwasher (put the camera inside the dishwasher and shoot OUT via self timer/remote), being taken out of the dishwasher, put back in the drawer.

It may be the same old spoon, but the situations sure would be varied.

You could try to lean away from the easy option of photos of people cooking and things like that and instead go for something abstract, using reflections in shiny utensils and so on. This will show that you are able to thing outside the normal views of things and use photography to look at the world in a different way.

I would imagine teaching someone to make salsa and take some close ups choping jalapenos, tomators and onio, etc.

The focus would be to show someone what kind of knives to use and how to use them

Of course, for this I would use either my macro lens or a regular lens with extender tubes and some hot lights to control the light better.

Oh, don't forget the tripod and someone with a nice manicure to handle the food