By Ilva - Lucullian Delights

Wow….it seemed I have stirred quite a few discussions with this Donna Hay  challenge.. Which I guess is a good thing too. The discussion mostly centered around the question of replicating and copying someone style. Which is definitely a valid discussion and while this is indeed a challenge where you have to copy someone elses image; it is not meant to copy someone’s style. The purpose of this challenge is not for you to learn how to copy someone’s style, but it is about being able to interpret where the light comes from in an image and how that reflects on the feel and mood of an image. That – to me – is a distinct difference. And challenge number two is already up and you can view it here!

Since this is the very first challenge I’m quite happy to say that some of my favorite people and photographers have taken on this challenge and made their version of the image. I’ve been really impressed too by the level of consistency that each and every entry has shown. Take a look for yourself and you will have to agree that there is not one big failure in there! (maybe it was too easy then after all..lol). I am not sure I’m going to be able to pick a winner here and I’m even tempted to say that the winning bit is the knowledge you got out of the challenge. Picking a winner by myself is purely a subjective choice, but I like Ilva’s image the most. Obviously you’re free to your own opinion.

I can add a voting form to the images but I think the exercise in itself is enough. Do you agree?

Below is an overview of the submissions and the links to the blogs and the posts on the challenge! If you read through them you can see how they experienced the exercise and join in the discussion! Feel free to leave a comment here on what you think of the results or how you experienced the challenge.

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1. Jenn, from the blog Jenncuisine. You can read her entry here
2. Ilva, from the brilliant blog Lucullian Delights. You can read her entry here
3.  Meeta from the blog What’s for Lunch Honey.  You can find her post here.
4. Magda from Magda’s Cauldron . You can find her post here
5.  Ann Vertriest from the blog Photocopy Ann here. She posted it on Flickr where you can view it here.
6. Gail from a stack of dishes.  Read what she had to say about the challenge here.
7. Kate’s from the blog ‘A Bobo Mess“. Read her entry here.
8. Astrid from Paulchen’s foodblog. You can read her entry here

Related Posts:

• DHSPC #6 – results and exciting news!
• Bruschetta with arugulapesto – DHSPC #6
• DHSPC #4 december results
• Sage and prosciutto corn cakes – Donna Hay Styling and photo Challenge #4
• Donna Hay #3 – the results

We all have our own heroes when it comes to food photography and styling and I’ve always been a huge fan of Donna Hay’s style and all the photographers she works with. It’s an uncluttered and beautiful style where the hero of the photo is always the food. Years ago, when I first started taking photos of food I found that it helps to look at some really good examples and try to analyze what makes that photo so good. Is it the light, is it the style or a combination of both? I even wrote a post about it more then two years ago, where I replicated one of Donna’s dishes from the magazine.

My version of the ricotta and white bean salad

There has also been a similar challenge on Flickr running for a while but that was geared towards any photo and I want to make this specifically about Donna’s recipes, so that’s where this challenge comes in.

For the very first challenge I thought to start with a fairly simple recipe of this white bean and ricotta salad. It’s the dish I made in 2009 so I know it’s not too difficult to do.

The styling does not involve many elements so the perfect way to start looking at the original photo and see how it was lit, how it was styled and how you would try to do that too. The original photo is from issue 42 of Donna Hay Magazine and the photo is from Chris Court

Original by Chris Court on the left

And here is the challenge recipe to make. The timing of this is slightly different then described in the rules below, but that is because it is the first one… You have until the end of september to recreate this dish (which is also delicious by the way) and to make your own version of the photo.

Ricotta and white bean salad

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Serves	2
Prep time	15 minutes
Cook time	15 minutes
Total time	30 minutes
Dietary	Vegetarian
Meal type	Lunch, Salad
Website	Donna Hay

Ingredients

• 400g cannellini beans ((or white beans, 1 can))
• 1 red onion (small)
• 30g black olived (pitted and halved)
• 1/4 cup flat leaf parsley (leaves only)
• 1-2 red chili (small and sliced)
• 125g cherry tomatoes (halved)
• seasalt
• black pepper (cracked)
• 100g ricotta (fresh)
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

Directions

Place the beans, onion, olives, parsley, chilli, tomato, salt and pepper in a bowl and toss gently to combine. Divide between serving plates and top with fresh ricotta. Combine the oil and vinegar and spoon over the salad to serve.

While Donna is famous for her brilliant and easy recipes she is equally famous for her inimitable styling. Of course she is helped along by fabulous photographers such as Con Poulos, Chris Court or William Meppem. So this challenge is not only about recreating a dish, it is about trying to come up with an equally brilliant styling and photographing job. I know… not easy but this is all about learning!

Rules:

• Once a month (on the 3rd of the month) I will give you a recipe plus the accompanying photo out of the Donna Hay magazine. I will try to make it seasonal but can’t promise anything.
• You have that same month to produce your post. You can post it any day you like just as long as you finish it before the end of that month at the latest.
• You have to  produce that recipe, alterations to the recipe are allowed to make sure any dietary restrictions are met. But only minor changes!
• You have to cook and STYLE the recipe trying to replicate the photo as best as you can. If you think you can do a better job then the original photo, by all means feel free to make your own changes to the styling.
• Shoot the dish and then write a blog post about it. It would be great to add notes on how you took the photo and how you styled the dish,  so that other people can learn too.
• Link back to this months blog post about the challenge and link back to the Donna Hay Challenge  (DHSPC) page here
• Leave a message on the post that is up here for that month, saying that you completed the challenge and link to the post on your site so others can find it too.
• If you want to use the original photo in your blog post as well as the recipe be sure to link back to the Donna Hay website plus the photographers website. They will both always be mentioned in the monthly challenge posts.
• I cannot stress this enough; but I am certainly not telling you to be a copycat and adopt someone else’s style as your own. While we do copy for this challenge, the goal here is completely different. It is all about learning how the light affects your image and how styling can make or break a photo too. Once you know all of that you can begin to develop your own style!

As you can see the rules are simple. The challenge, however is not. Each month a winner will be chosen who produced the best dish/photo of the month and will be posted to the Hall of Fame. That is the only reward you will get out of this challenge. That plus eternal fame ofcourse…

Approval has been requested and received from the Donna Hay team in running this challenge. I do ask you to make sure you always credit the right source when using some of the original images. Thanks!

Related Posts:

• Artichoke and feta tarts – DHSP challenge #7
• Rumpsteak or potatoes; Donna Hay challenge nr. 8
• Sage and prosciutto corn cakes – Donna Hay Styling and photo Challenge #4
• Bruschetta with arugulapesto – DHSPC #6
• DHSPC #6 – results and exciting news!

Delicious and quick lunch dish

I have this dilemma that I need your help with… I have currently three different blogs. One in English which you are reading right now, and two in Dutch; Frog Bites and De Glazen Vork. Frogbites is basically the same as this one but in Dutch and De Glazen Vork is a sort of online culinary magazine with mostly recipes, events and other culinary things that are of interest. Now as you might have guessed it is taking a bit too much time (as if I couldn’t have thought of that before starting them!) and well a person can only do so much right? But what would you do? I’m definitely keeping this one as it is the oldest and I like the whole international foodie community. Wouldn’t want to miss it.

So that’s not even a question; but… what about the two dutch ones? They are both not as big as Junglefrog Cooking. I’ve had Frogbites for 2 years and the other for 6 months. De Glazen Vork is a shared thing together with other writers and theoretically costs me less time then Frogbites. Since the latter is a proper blog it requires more attention. Comments to be answered, other blogs to be visited. I just feel that I would abandon my followers if I stopped posting there. You know what I mean? Sort of like throwing away a brainchild.. Does that sound silly?

While the foodblogging community is very international, there are still quite a few people in the Netherlands that have an issue with speaking or reading English. More then you would guess. So… I’m thinking of leaving Frog Bites behind (*shudder*) and just continuing with Junglefrog Cooking and De Glazen Vork. It’s also that I feel I’m losing creativity having to write blogposts in two languages about more or less the same topics. I never really repeat myself, so it is different but still… no good!

What would you do if you were me? What would you keep and what would you get rid of? Impossible question probably but I got to ask! I guess I already know the answer too but still….

Now over to more important business… For lunch I had this delicious and super easy egg dish. You can literally throw in loads of leftovers (as I used here sausages I had left and roasted bell peppers that needed using up) and it’ll still taste fabulous! It does take some time in the oven but if need be you could make this in a frying pan and be a bit quicker about it.

Frittata with rocket & peppers

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Serves	2
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	30 minutes
Total time	40 minutes
Allergy	Egg
Meal type	Lunch
Misc	Child Friendly, Serve Hot
Region	European

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 1 handful rocket
• 75g ricotta
• 250g cooking cream (light)
• 200g sausages (use any sausage you like. I used the tinned variety, we call knakworst here)
• seasalt
• pepper
• 1-2 bellpepper roasted
• 2 slices bread (toasted)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 200C. Put cream, eggs, pepper and seasalt together in a bowl and whisk well to combine.

Take two bowls and pour half of the mixture in each bowl. Take some rocket and put it in the bowl, cut up small slices of the peppers and add those as well. Cut the sausages into small pieces and add those to the dish. End by adding little blobs of ricotta on top of the eggs and a few sage leaves. You can add some grated parmesan if you like.

Put the bowl into the oven and leave for about 30 minutes. You want the middle to be just set but still a bit moist. Eat with toasted bread.

Note

This is a really quick lunch dish apart from the fact that it does need to be in the oven for quite a well. Alternatively you could make this also in a frying pan. Adding different ingredients would work well. I think I might prefer something with a bit more flavor for next time instead of the ricotta.

Still a bit too moist but I think that is due to the amount of cream I used

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• How not to cook risotto – cooking club!
• Gnocchi with garden peas
• Carrot cake
• Sourdough bruschetta
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Almond gooseberry cakes with custard and gooseberry sauce

Did you know that the task of filling the black box with meaningful contents is actually underrated? It’s almost as difficult, if not more difficult, to decide what to put in as it is to make something out of it! For those who do not know… the Black Box is some kind of mystery box that Tom and I are using to challenge each other in cooking. We take turns; one month Tom fills the box and I get to cook or the other way around. We can pick up to 5 ingredients and adding more ingredients is allowed (for now…) This is our third session and you can read about the first one here and the second one here..

So this time it as my turn to fill the box with yummy goods and I struggled. I struggled a lot! At first I wanted to add quail in but then the Paperchef challenge for this week is also quail so that fell of the list. I went back and forth; added chestnut paste (tinned variety), then tamarind paste but took them all out again and what we ended up was the following list of ingredients:

• Marrow fatpeas (fresh ones ofcourse
• Gooseberries
• Livar Rack (livar is a pig raised in Limburg one of the provences of the Netherlands and is raised for flavor. They are free range and roam around an abbey, which is why they are also called cloister pigs!)
• Akvavit (alcoholic drink used a lot for cooking)
• parmaham

Fresh marrowfat peas

I thought it was a fairly simple challenge..lol… but ofcourse when you buy the ingredients you have an idea on what you could make with it.. So what did he make? I’ve first got to tell you that he made a dessert… I think that must have been the first time ever that he actually baked something sweet… For a guy who doesn’t particularly like desserts that was a big thing… Which is why that is the first photo here… It’s nicely plated too don’t you think?

With the marrow fat peas (which I think is a really weird name as these are called capucijners in Dutch… which would literally translated be something like capucin…) he made a starter and prepared the peas in three different ways. He cooked them in the regular way and served those with little crispy bacon bits, the second version was braised slowly in honey and served with parmaham, then the third was pureed with tomatoes, peppers, creme fraiche and some other ingredients and served with tomato bruschetta’s.

Marrowfat peas 3 different ways

As a main we had the rack of Livar which was first quickly baked with a crust of parmezan and breadcrumbs to give it a cruncy, salty exterior and then finished in the oven. When I bought the rack it was vacuumsealed and that always makes it looks smaller then it actually is, so it was way to big for me to finish but it was very tasty.

He wanted to serve this with a simple pasta with just garlic and roasted tomatoes and while a good idea, the pasta was a tiny bit too dry.

Then on to dessert which were the almond gooseberry tarts with a homemade custard and a gooseberry sauce with akvavit. All in all quite an impressive dinner and very tasty too…   I will now share with you the recipe for the almonds cakes!

Almond gooseberry cakes

5.0 from 2 reviews

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Recipe type: Dessert

Author: Tom Gerrets

Rather heavy but delicious dessert

Ingredients

• 250 gr gooseberries
• 85 gr ground almond flour
• 5 gr cornstarch
• 1 egg
• 85 gr icing sugar
• 1 tbsp ricotta
• 85 gr almondpaste or butter

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 175 C. Crumble the almondpaste by hand. In a bowl mix the almondpasta, cornstarch, sugar and the almondflour. Add the ricotta and egg and mix it all through until completely blended. Now carefully add the gooseberries.
2. Put the mixture into baking tins. Muffins forms work really well but use any form you like. Make sure you grease them properly before adding the mixture in!
3. Bake for about 15 minutes in the preheated oven. Leave to cool for 5 minutes, take them out of the tins and sprinkle with icing sugar to serve.

1.2.4

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Macaroni with peas, bacon and ricotta

After working today I figured I wanted something tasty and quick. Quick these days seems to be the major keyword…. Tom is out tonight, which meant I get to make things he doesn’t like and he doesn’t like ricotta, so when I saw this recipe in the Good Food of this month, that seemed like the perfect choice. The original recipe calls for mint, but they didn’t have it in the supermarket and to be quite honest; for some reason I don’t really think that mint and pasta are such a fabulous combination anyway. I was willing to try it, but the supermarket got in the way.. (o excuses, excuses…)

It was really quick. The cooking of the pasta was really the part that took the longest (5 minutes) so fabulously tasty and ridiculously fast for something so good. Now I will tell you the recipe a little later. I have to share one more secret today and that is that I am addicted…. Yes, ladies and gentlemen… I am addicted. You can guess to what if you have a look at the next photo:

I’m addicted to Grey’s Anatomy!! Now unfortunately I have run out of seasons. I never watch it on tv, as I always miss loads of episodes and then forget to tape it, but I buy the complete seasons on dvd… But as I said; they’ve run out of new seasons for Grey’s Anatomy, so imagine the joy when I found this two days ago! Spin-off Private practice; the complete first season… Now I am sure there are many people out there who now think I am a lunatic. Quite frankly Tom always makes sure he is far away when I am about to watch one of the series, as I usually end up crying anyway. Haha, what is the fun in watching a series that makes you cry? I guess that cannot be explained. You either get it or you don’t. Period… I just watched the first episode (and yes, I cried!!) during my dinner. Gotta do some more work, but I will for sure watch another episode before the night is over!

And now over to the recipe:

400 gr pasta (any shape)

250 gr. frozen peas

125 gr ricotta

bacon

olive oil

mint (I used basil instead)

parmezan

Cook the pasta. In the meantime fry the bacon in another pan untill it turns golden. Add the peas and about 4 tablespoons of water. Bring to a boil untill the peas start to soften and the water is evaporated. Add the pasta and stir in the ricotta. If the pasta seems to dry add a bit of the cooking water of the pasta. Season to taste and scatter with basil leaves and parmezan shavings. And voila done!

Related Posts:

• Gnocchi with garden peas
• Tagliatelle with saffron, bacon and peas
• Pasta with sausage, beans, peas and mint
• Sage and prosciutto corn cakes – Donna Hay Styling and photo Challenge #4
• Pasta with shrimps and a little story