A gingery beef stir-fry and the lovely Sciacca

This time a new month means also a new year. I am still on holiday mode and probably not ready yet to commit the year past to paper. Quite frequently my thoughts need a noticeable amount of time to crystallize into a concrete expression of words and metaphoric images. It will come the time when my ode to 2012 will be ready for publishing but for the moment it is Secret Recipe Club time (not without a brief account of my holidays so far)!

The past two weeks have been quite unusual for me and my family; spending the holidays far from home but still in a home with a family, a large family not yet formally ours, have made these festivities something to remember.

Autumn thoughtfulness and CreativeLIVE

Autumn is the season of change. From the vibrant electricity of Summer days we slowly transition toward a sleepy November. The skies often mirror our moods and our woolly cloaks. Mornings are dark  the blankets become our best friends.
The sun isn't disappeared from our lives, it shyly emerges seldom from its blankets in the dark blue sky bringing a warming smile into our daily routines. Somehow this season always makes me more introspective and focused toward the future, the light at the end of a cloudy day.

Nutty Swedish Meatballs

This month you are lucky! Two post in just a few days, must be a record for me, I hope that isn't too much inspiration for your belly to bare.

I am very happy to announce that my Pomegranate shot won February DMBLGiT challenge in the Originality category; my first win in this challenge! Many thanks to the judges for choosing my entry. 

If you want to enter the March edition of the challenge, check the details on Wendy's post.

Another month has passed since the last Secret Recipe Club and at this round I was assigned the inspiring Delishhh Blog from Ewa. She usually posts homey kind of recipes with interesting flavor or presentation twists. I saw her Cinnamon sugar pull apart bread back when she originally posted the recipe and found it a very fun and yummy idea, I will have to try soon (I hope).

Coco-nutty crepes cake for #NellysBigDay

So it seems that the day has come... Nelly got hooked up. Nah it isn't for her endless ranting about the sprigs of mint over desserts and neither because of her magnificent contribution to the extintion of bananas
Murray finally asked her to be his lovely wife (blinkey-blinkey ring and all). But I bet you all know that by now, she was squeeking for DAYS! I had to use hamburger buns on my ears to avoid breaking my timpans.

Joke aside, Nelly is just on of the sweetest-jumping Dominican I have met so far. We know each other since 1 year but as all Twitter-relationships, we end up knowing each other more than we do our family. We do spend the best part of hour waking hours together after all.

Roasted Onions stuffed with masala quinoa, amaranth and caramelized Brussel sprouts

I am going through a period when I just do not feel the sparks sparkle. New dishes may come out and find their way to paper but they stop there, there is no drive into cooking them or is it perhaps the photo shoot that somehow scares me?
To create compelling pictures you need a driving idea, a theme that is going to diffuse into your pictures. Most of my works so far have been concentrated in shooting the bare food, isolating it rather than making it part of an organic context.
Treating the plated food as a sculpture, an object of beauty with its own right to shine has always attracted me but now it doesn't seem to be enough.