I arrived in New York yesterday to visit my good friend Tom. Because of some stupid passport regulations Teresa couldn't come along and is getting another passport now - I really hope that she can come along on friday.

Meanwhile, I try to enjoy New York, which is pretty easy because the weather is magnificent. I'm pretty tired from walking around all day, but here are a few first photos from this beautiful city:

The first recipe in this series, while quite nice, was not much of an invention. This postings “Moreish Mooncake” a.k.a. the “Buster Keaton cake” is the result of a few attempts to bring together, in one cake, the two great worlds of the carrot cake and the poppy seed cake. It was baptized recently at a splendid dinner hosted by my good friends Roman and Ulf, when Ulf told us about how his Scottish step-aunt would call great food “moreish” because you always wanted to eat more of them. I first came up with the original recipe for Teresa’s Birthday. So, Teresa, this one is for you:

Ingredients: 150g butter, 150g sugar, 5 eggs, 50 finely ground breadcrumbs, 120g poppy seeds, 300g carrots, 100g ground almonds (walnuts or hazelnuts might also be nice but Teresa is allergic to those), 1 organic lemon (you need the zest and the juice), 200g sour crème. For the icing: 1 lemon, 250g icing sugar, red currant jam.

Whip the butter and the sugar until it is a homogenous crème, slowly add the 5 egg yolks. Add the breadcrumbs and the poppy seeds, the carrots, the almonds and finally the lemon juice, zest and the sour cream. Add the beaten white of egg (this is what the leo online dictionary gives me for “Eischnee” – literally egg-snow. Sometimes I really like German…). Bake at medium temperature for about one hour.

While the cake is still hot, spread a thin layer of the jam on the cake. For the icing, whip the icing sugar with the juice of one lemon and, if needed, small amounts of warm water. When you think it has the right consistency, pour it over the cake.

Buster Keaton, also known as “the great stone face”, made some brilliant silent film sketches in the 1920ies. Today the term slapstick has a pretty negative connotation, but this genius's perfect timing and his sublime body control just blow me away. Just like, hopefully, this cake will blow you away :)

As always, this cake is released under a creative commons license.

I recently had the idea to use my blog to write down recipes that I come up with. I love cooking, and sometimes I make up nice dishes that I think could be worth sharing. And, as I also love films, I thought it was only natural to name all my recipes after great films or directors. So, here goes my first one: "Duck a la Antonioni".

Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian director whose films were often very precisely composed and had a simple elegance. This recipe hopes to capture some of the same spirit (I recommend "La Notte" to go with it):
 

Ingredients for 2 persons: approx 400g Duck filet with skin, 1/2 Fennel, 3 Carrots, Potatoes, Parsley.

Heat up a pan (use no fat as the duck has plenty of its own) and fry the duck filet. Cut the fennel to small pieces and fry it in some olive oil until it starts to caramelise, then add the cut carrots and just before everything is done salt & freshly ground pepper. Cook the Potatoes in water, then fry them in a little butter and add the parsley. Voilà!

(A little note: usually I use onions with all vegetables, but for this dish I think it's a good idea to put some faith in the fennel and carrots and let them stand by themselves)

This recipe is licensed under a creative commons license ;)

Teresa and I finally finished redesigning our photography portfolio website iconoclash.org. Iconoclash.org is our commercial portfolio, so we went for a rather slick look and the selection doesn't include any of our more experimental photos. I built the main menu in flash, the galleries were created in Adobe Lightroom with the help of the great LRG Gallery templates and the text pages (contact and info links) were implemented with the content management system drupal that also runs this website here.

With this done I can now finally finish my short film Coriolis and take up editing Go again, the short film Teresa and I shot last summer. 

With Christmas holidays comes time to read. I just finished the book “Reinventing the Bazaar” by John McMillan, and I liked it a lot and felt like recommending it to everyone who happens to read this blog. It’s a refreshingly sober discussion of market mechanisms, showing where they work well as well as where they fail and what might be done in these cases. McMillan is also one of the few individuals who, while being very adept in their particular field, have no false pride about their profession that prevents them from admitting defeat – like his discussion of the failure of the shock introduction of free markets in the 90ies in Russia that was prescribed by western economists. “Reinventing the Bazaar” shines especially where he highlights the failures and shortcomings of market mechanisms, like his chapter on intellectual property titled “The embarrassment of a patent”, but all the time he tries to explain the reasoning behind the introduction and what the original intentions were. His insights, expressed in simple terms, are, in my humble opinion, required reading for anyone remotely interested in economics.