Is this thread still a thing? I know I'm late to the party, but after looking at all that food, I feel compelled to comment. But first, I must say, many compliments to Chef! Your food looks awesome. As the second post notes, this is real food, not the staged stuff.
I'm probably not smart enough to just stay out of this, especially since the thread is so old. However, I looked at all your photos on Flickr, and noticed a couple things. First, I see that every shot was in Auto Exposure mode, and your metering mode varied some. Your lighting also seemed to vary from ambient to occasional flash, although I didn't see any utilizing TTL.
I haven't photographed any food, but I've done some product shots for my wife's craft endeavors. As a starting point for a shoot, I would suggest the following:
If you're having trouble matching your lens to the framing in a manner that suits you, consider a small telephoto, but from what I see, your 50 mm lens should do OK.
Put your camera in Manual mode. You'll need to know more about the scene than your camera does.
Set your metering to Multi mode.
Use a good speedlight off-camera with an umbrella or softbox.
A light stand for your key light, and a tripod for the camera.
Have a white reflector or two to control the shadows.
Set the aperture wide open for framing only.
Set the shutter to sync speed, or slower.
Set the flash on manual at 1/4 power, and face it into the umbrella.
Now set the aperture to f8 or f11. You won't be able to see the shot well, but the flash is now essentially your exposure, shutter speed, and key light.
Take a test shot and evaluate. Move the flash power and/or compensate it until you get an exposure that suits you.
If you don't want to go so far as the umbrella, you can probably do well bouncing the flash and using a reflector or two. You also mentioned you're working in a small space. I find using Camera Remote works well when you can't huddle around the camera body. Once you get a composition and light coverage you like, make the flash power the fine tuning for the exposure.
I don't see a scenario such that the flash will do a good job on-camera. It needs to be off. Did you get an EF-X8 flash with your camera? I find that little flash in Commander mode works extremely well triggering any larger flash with an optical slave mode.
I hope this helps literally anyone, but I can't write more right now; I'm going to the OP's website to look at more food right now.