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.

As some of the people who read this blog may know, I study directing at the filmschool filmArche in Berlin. Over the last year I have been asked to colour correct a number of movies since this is one of my favourite steps in filmmaking and I think I have become quite decent at it by now. I love to see my fellow filmmakers faces when I show them how much a shot can be enhanced / altered with subtle changes to the colour of the film.