salad ingredients

The indecisiveness is driving me completely insane… While I thought I had made the final decision to get rid of my studio, every time I go there for work or something else, I get sad… really sad.. So now I am starting to question my own decision. Maybe there is another way to make it work and where on earth to I keep all the things I collected over the years that fit fine into a 120 square meter space, but not so fine into a 10 square meter space that will be all that I have left… *Big sigh and pulling my hair out*

What I did do today is go to my landlord and just tell him my problem. That I don’t WANT to leave but that is has become too expensive for the amount of time I am there and well, basically I asked him if he would rent it for a little less.

So healthy!

He didn’t say no right away so that is the good news. He will need to discuss it with his brother and business partner, so the story continues. I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore it feels like. My mind jumps from decision to decision; one minute I think ‘Yeah it makes sense to give it up.” and the other minute I get all desperate and wonder where on earth would I be able to do my job?? Ofcourse there are pro’s and cons that I can think about all rationally but in the end it is my heart that is the biggest problem. I love that space; it is so me. I’ve been there for almost 4 years, we decorated it ourselves and build it up from scratch.

As if it had to be I was contacted today by someone who wants to rent the studio every now and then. That would help although the problem with things like that is that there is no certainty. But if the rent would go down a bit plus this man would rent the studio every now and then, I could maybe, just maybe, keep the studio… We’ll see… time will tell! I have till the end of March to make the final and definitive decision, so I have some more time to drive myself insane.. Yeah!

Still some poppyseed left!

Now on to this lovely salad; I’ve been really good these last few weeks. Tom and I have taken on the habit of going for a walk together every day after work, we’ve been eating very healthy, no snacking in between and no wine other then in the weekends… (a girl’s gotta have some fun!) For a lot of our grocery shopping we now walk to the store instead of taking the car (saves on gas too) so all in all, we’re doing good. The result is that I lost 8 pounds so far (as you can see from the little badge on the right) and while still a long way to go, the beginning is there!

I made this delicious and very quick salad while I was in the studio this morning and I had it for lunch. It’s a bit too light with only 138 kcal so I did have some bread later. No need to starve myself, but this is delicious and adding a bit of bacon maybe would make it a bit more filling too.

This salad is also very fitting for Mona’s Living Leaner as this is literally made from leftovers we had in the fridge and cupboard! So cost for extra was 0 and I prevented wastage!

Lettuce, chicory and apple salad

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Serves:	6
Prep time:	15 minutes
Cook time:	None
Total time:	15 minutes
Dietary:	Vegetarian
Meal type:	Salad, Side Dish
Misc:	Serve Cold
Region:	Worldwide
Website:	BBC Good Food

Ingredients

• 100g mixed salad leaves
• 1 head white chicory (trimmed and separated into leaves)
• 1 piece apple (cored and sliced)
• 25 g toasted pistachio
• 25g sunflower seeds
• 75g cherry tomatoes (halved)

Dressing

• 2,5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2,5 tablespoons Honey
• 2,5 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1/2 tablespoon whole grain mustard
• 1 teaspoon poppy seed

Directions

Arrange the salad ingredients on a large plate or big salad bowl. Put all the ingredients for the dressing together in a jar or bowl and shake or stir until well combined. When ready to serve sprinkle some of the dressing over the salad and toss together.

Note

Quantities and ingredients are adapted from the original recipe to what I had on hand. Obviously you can change nuts and other ingredients to your liking

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• Quinoa, feta and walnut salad
• Tarly salad with orange hazelnut dressing – living leaner
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Orange and poppyseed bundt cake

As soon as I open our stock pantry I feel like closing the door right back again. There is so much junk in there that it scares me to start organizing. Going through the contents however I do find a large jar of poppy seed…

Remember I told you I would probably have to give up the studio? Well, the decision has been made that it has to go and now that the decision is made, I’m fine with that. It just makes sense financially and also logistically. We’ve decided that one of the rooms upstairs will be converted in a mini studio. It will be big enough to store all my props and do food shoots. Anything else would either have to be on location or it will have to be in a rented studio, which will still be many more times cheaper then the 12.000 euro I pay now every year.

Cutting into the cake

But having said that; converting a room into a studio might sound easy in theory but in reality it means a whole lot of work. This room has been used as our “catroom” for 13 years. Remember we used to have 5 cats at the low point in our lives (way too many!!) but since there is only one left, having a catroom for just Gizmo is ridiculous. Besides her food and catlitterbox it also has a very large bookshelf stuffed with things we never looked at, a huge wardrobe and a little freezer. All that will have to go so we started planning on de-cluttering our entire house; not just the one room. And I cannot believe the amount of junk we gathered in the last 20 years since we’ve been together. All the stuff that we kept in the attic in boxes can basically all go (and has gone by now) We’ve brought cars full of stuff to the second hand store (books and things that might still be of use to other people) and an equal amount of car loads full went to the garbage.

It’s one of those things you start with, not realizing the enormous amount of work involved. It makes sense to do it now as Tom is at home, not having a job, so it keeps him occupied.. The attic is as good as ready, the soon-to-be-studio is empty apart from the wardrobe closet (need to sort out all the clothes first before we moved that one) Once it’s empty it will be painted and maybe a new floor too and then I can start moving things from the studio into the home studio. But let’s not get ahead of myself; that will probably be a few months from now.

In the meantime I also found a huge jar of poppy seed. 500 grams unopened to be exact. What on earth do you do with 500 grams of poppy seed? Sprinkling it on buns and stuff like that will not help much so when I saw this recipe for a poppy seed Bundt cake I could not resist and had to make it immediately! It uses a whopping amount of 120 grams so only 380 grams left. (Any ideas on what to do with the rest please let me know!)

Orange poppyseed Bundt cake

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Serves:	10-12
Prep time:	35 minutes
Cook time:	1 hour, 5 minutes
Total time:	1 hour, 40 minutes
Meal type:	Dessert
Region:	Worldwide
From magazine:	Delicious magazine

Ingredients

• 120g poppy seed
• 250ml milk
• 225g butter (soft at roomtemperature, plus a little extra for greasing the tin)
• 220g sugar
• 3 eggs
• 300g flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 vanilla bean (seeds scraped)
• 1 tablespoon orange zest
• 4 tablespoons orange juice

orange glaze

• 125ml golden syrup
• 1 orange (make very thin strips of the zest and juice the rest of the orange)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease a bundt cake tin with a diameter of 20 cm and lightly dust with flour. Heat the poppyseed with the milk in a saucepan until almost boiling and then take the pan of the heat. Leave to cool while you work on your cake batter.

Whisk the butter and the sugar together on medium speed until you have a thick and pale mixture. Add the eggs one by one while you keep whisking. Put the flour and baking powder together through a sieve and ad a pinch of salt. Spoon a third of the flour mixture through the buttermix. Spoon half the poppyseed mix through the batter, then a third of the flour mixture again, the rest of the poppyseed mixture and then ending with the last third of the flour mixture. You should be left with a smooth but airy texture of the batter. Mix in the vanilla, orangezest and the orange juice. Pour the batter into the cake tin and put the cake one level below the middle in the oven. Bake for about 55-65 minutes or until a wooden skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for about 5 minutes and then carefully turn out onto a cake rack where you should let it cool for another 3 hrs.

Heat the golden syrup with the orange strips and the orange juice in a small saucepan on low heat. Leave to boil softly for about 4-5 minutes while stirring occasionally. It should reduce to about 2/3 of the original volume. Pour the glaze with the orange over the bundt cake just shortly before serving.

Note

Golden syrup is not easy to find in the Netherlands. it's like stroop but a much lighter color. There are apparently a few supermarkets that sell it. I've heard people mentioning Vomar or even Xenos or Action. You should be able to find it online for sure. If not, you can use honey like I did. It worked fine for me, but ofcourse I do not know what the flavor will be with golden syrup. it was delicious with honey, so a good alternative I think.

I have a thing for bundt cakes, so if you want a few more ideas have a look at;

Pineapple and toasted coconut Bundt cake

Apple and nuts Bundt cake

Donna Hay’s lemon sour bundt cake

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Ofcourse having watched Remco at work the week before it was  a great opportunity to try out some newly learned tricks when Ollie came for the second time to the studio last week. The idea was to make something with “stacking” which is a pretty broad area anyway, but I kind of left it to his skills to make something nice and he certainly did!
We did two dishes; the above one is my favorite of the day. It’s zeekraal (I’m sorry but I have no idea how to translate that into english) and rice with seaspaghetti and smoked monkfish on top. The tiny bit of orange in the middle is caviar.
I used one bowens gemini 500 from the left shooting through tracing paper and fill in on the right with foamboard. I used a small mirror to light the caviar in the middle as that would otherwise be too dark.
The first dish we did was spaghetti with bloodsausage.

Can you still remember when we used to get that on a regular basis at home? Red cabbage with apple and bloodsausage? I never used to realize that it was actually made from real blood…. anyway, we had the same thing for lunch and it was really tasty. I know I still find it a bit… well, weird that I am eating blood… kind of vampiric I guess..:) but nevertheless it tasted good with the red onion on top. Delicious!!
We had a great day and I think some good photos that came out of it, so I am quite happy. It’s funny how I had more photos of the setup then of the actual dish.
While Ollie was preparing the food I was busy trying out various lighting things and styling, only to end up with a minimal amount of styling. I am just not too good in styling the table and I like the focus to be on the food, so closeup works best for me anyway.
Happy with the results!

I’ve been so busy lately with other stuff that I haven’t had much time to do any proper cooking myself, so I hope that one of these weeks I will get to try some new recipes. Lots of exciting new cookbooks to try!

Related Posts:

• Foodstyling attempt no. 1
• Food photography class
• Working with a foodstylist
• Quick update
• Lemon Sour Bundt Cake – DHSPC #2

After reading something on Lara Ferroni’s blog Stillife with…. I had to check out something she posted on a foodphotography class that was going to be online. Now you have to know that it is extremely hard to find anything to do with either foodstyling or foodphotography in Holland. The UK you can probably find some, but most of the stuff is originating from the US.
I have been thinking about going to the US to do either a foodstyling workshop or a one on one workshop with a foodphotographer, but that costs – obviously – a small fortune, since I would have to fly to the US, stay there for some time and then ofcourse also pay for the workshop itself. Which is simply not cheap.
Anyway, so I read all about the online course given by The Perfect Picture School and I figured I give it a go, so I enrolled for the four week course in foodphotography, It’s all online, so each week we receive a lesson as well as an assignment.

The first lesson is all about learning how to control the light from different sources; starting with daylight and then we’re moving to artificial light with it’s various options and attachments etc. I have been practicing a bit this afternoon with a bunch of grapes and a cookie..
I’ll show you here the differences and the lighting I used. Keep in mind though that none of these files have been edited, so they are straight from the raw file. The idea was also to try and shoot the same scene in daylight and with artificial light but trying to get the same lighting more or less.

Daylight from the right, no reflection

Artificial light (studioflash Bowens Gemini 500) no reflection

Daylight from the right with reflector on the left

Studioflash from the right with reflector on the left

Daylight from behind no reflection used

Daylight from behind with reflection

Studioflash from behind with no reflection

Studioflash from behind with reflection on the front

Angled studioflash from 45 degrees behind left with grid and barndoors

Angled studioflash with grid and barndoors and reflection from the right
As you can see the various angles and reflection used make a huge difference on the final result!! It wasn’t exactly new material but it is always good to go and have a good look at how the light behaves anyway.

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• Foodphotography;shooting at night or in low light
• Working with foodstylist
• Winterfood
• First shoot in new studio
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Cookies

Related Posts:

• Food photography class
• Marzipan roses…
• Sage and prosciutto corn cakes – Donna Hay Styling and photo Challenge #4
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