Bits and pieces

A few delicious recipes are coming soon on the blog. I’m officially in love with the new Jamie’s 15 minute meals programme. Unfortunately, I don’t have the book yet and given my extremely short memory I had to improvise. Sometimes I nap during half of the episode and then have to make up. The end result was good enough to share it with you. Again, Jamie, you rule, big time. I love everything you do. 

For my version of the recipe you’ll need:

1 cup basmati rice

1 chilli

5cm fresh, grated ginger

a bunch of spring onions

2tbsp olive oil

1 cup green peas

2 fish fillets

3 hard boiled eggs

zest and juice of 1 lemon

What to do:

Start with cooking the rice and eggs. In a seperate pot bring to a boil 0,5l of water with 2 bay leaves, add fish and cook for 10 mins until it falls apart. While the rice and fish are almost ready heat olive oil in a big frying pan. 

Fry chilli, ginger and spring onions for 1-2 mins. Drain rice and put it in the pan together with peas. 

Add lemon zest and juice, season with salt and pepper, cook for 2 mins until peas are soft (not too soft). Serve with chilli yoghurt (yoghurt with chilli sauce) and fried italian cabbage with oyster sauce (both my idea).

As soon as I get the book, I promise to post the original recipe, unless, maybe some of you know it :) 

 We’ve been drinking Vietnamese coffee for the last 2 weeks. We got it as a gift from my brother and his wife. The original coffee calls for condensed milk but we ran out of it and had to replace it with regular milk. 

I love this little pumpkin and all her faces. 

We also made some super easy, 3 ingredient coconut macarons. We used them as ice cream sandwiches. 

We love when there is not much in the fridge and the things that end up on our plate are just plain delicious. Here, chicken quesadilla with plum sauce (thanks Mom for home made plum jam).

This has been happening for the last few days but we’re almost in the clear. I love our new ofice/study. We’ll post it very soon.

Now, we’re packing our bags and leaving for a spring weekend. We couldn’t be more excited.

Photo Challenge #1

Some time ago I came up with the idea of doing photo challenges for myself. The point here is to come up with an idea for a photo (or more often take inspiration from someone else's work) and try to make it work. Hopefully, this series might be helpful for anyone who's starting in photography and is looking for any kind of hints. Also, like most of our posts it's sort of a diary for myself so that I don't forget the early stages of my hobby that is photography.

This time the task, or the end result, was a pretty straightforward one. I wanted to achieve a typical studio look where the background is completely white and the subject is well lit. Sort of like the United Colors of Benetton adds.

The biggest problem here is that I don't have flash lamps (apart from the built in one) so this is how we got about doing it.

Ginger was a natural I might add :)

We recently bought a white background but that's rather obvious as we don't have white walls. On the left is an Arri 600W film lamp that I was lucky to buy recently. Its main purpose is to light up scenes in movies but here it worked really fine lighting up the white in the background. On the right is a small studio lamp that seems to give a lot of light at first but I find it too weak for this setup. Plus it has a different temperature so the subject might turn out blueish. We also used a small blend to light up Ginger from the bottom.
As we don't have a flash, the built in one had to do so I took a small metal plate and bounced the flash light of the ceiling and it worked out fine.
Here are some examples and the final results with some Snapseed and Photoshop work done on them.

As you can see there wasn't enough light to capture the whole subject so I decided to focus on the upper body instead.

Have a lovely day!

Kamil

Photo Challenge #1

Some time ago I came up with the idea of doing photo challenges for myself. The point here is to come up with an idea for a photo (or more often take inspiration from someone else’s work) and try to make it work. Hopefully, this series might be helpful for anyone who’s starting in photography and is looking for any kind of hints. Also, like most of our posts it’s sort of a diary for myself so that I don’t forget the early stages of my hobby that is photography.

This time the task, or the end result, was a pretty straightforward one. I wanted to achieve a typical studio look where the background is completely white and the subject is well lit. Sort of like the United Colors of Benetton adds.

The biggest problem here is that I don’t have flash lamps (apart from the built in one) so this is how we got about doing it.

Ginger was a natural I might add :)

We recently bought a white background but that’s rather obvious as we don’t have white walls. On the left is an Arri 600W film lamp that I was lucky to buy recently. Its main purpose is to light up scenes in movies but here it worked really fine lighting up the white in the background. On the right is a small studio lamp that seems to give a lot of light at first but I find it too weak for this setup. Plus it has a different temperature so the subject might turn out blueish. We also used a small blend to light up Ginger from the bottom.
As we don’t have a flash, the built in one had to do so I took a small metal plate and bounced the flash light of the ceiling and it worked out fine.
Here are some examples and the final results with some Snapseed and Photoshop work done on them.

As you can see there wasn’t enough light to capture the whole subject so I decided to focus on the upper body instead.

Have a lovely day!

Kamil

Easter weekend in pictures

Hello there! It's been a while...again. I don't know if it's my lack of inspiration or exhaustion caused by the neverending winter in Poland. Maybe it's both. I'll be honest here, I've been thinking of calling time of death for this blog many times. But somehow it's become a part of my life, very teeny tiny but it really did. I've met (only online) so many interesting people here, found so many wonderful blogs, read so many inspirational posts. I've been struggling with some problems of my own and many of these blogs have helped me look at them from a different perspective, they made me set my priorities, knowing them will help me change and I need this change although it is a long process. 

Let's say I'm constantly adjusting my frequency and knowing there are so many people in the blogspot community going through similar stuff helps...a lot. So, I think I'll stick around for a while longer. Receiving emails and comments from you makes it really worth it. 

Well, anyway, we visited my parents this Easter which looked and felt more like Christmas. We spent it indoors most of the time. If not Ginger we would have stayed there for the entire time. The trip to my parents was horrible and very dangerous, at least the journey back was decent. This is what we saw on friday, when we were supposed to set off. 

...at least it was warm

...and Ginger had a blast, seriously, I've never seen my dog this happy.

The beginning of this post may sound a bit pessimistic but we are both fine, we jumped almost as high as Ginger :) Life is good, at least most of the time. 

When it comes to food we have nothing fancy to brag about this time. We made some cookies and cakes last year but this time I was a complete failure in the kitchen. Not only did I come up with just two recipes but the first one ended up in the bin and the other was lemon polenta cake I made a while ago. These were supposed to look like these and I was so excited. Once I put them upside down the real fun began. I watched them all slide down the sticks in slow motion, one by one. It's funny now but believe me...it made me shed a tear. 

 I hope you had a wonderful time this Easter. If you have some more interesting pictures of the easter table feel free to share it here with us.