Cooking, but not cooking

On Tuesday I had a super busy day with a shoot in Oldham which meant me rising from my bed at a very unpleasant and dark 6am. The car was thick with ice and the sky was black all the way to our initial meeting at the Sainsbury's cafe at 8am where I had a surprisingly tasty and welcomingly warm bowl of porridge. Then it was out in the cold to shoot (in a photographic sense) a gang of architects, designers and other clever folk outside the Art Gallery and then a few more locations which took us up to a still chilly 3pm. On the way home I was mentally planning a delicious tomato and onion based seafood pasta dish - nice and quick, nice and satisfying, and after recovering from the day's exertions, the cooking began. Then it stopped very quickly as all the electricity went out and we were plunged into darkness and silence. After some detective work, it turned out that our oven and hob or the oven or the hob had died a death and taken all of our electricity with it. That was Tuesday, today is Friday and we have no means to cook and we have a friend coming for supper. The obvious thing, I appreciate is to go out for supper, but after the abandoned seafood pasta we popped to the excellent Persia Grill, the next day we had a splendid and surprisingly un-greedy take away from the excellent Great Khatmandu and last nights disappointing first time visit to Green Tea (Chinese), I really didn't want to eat out again. So after much consideration I took myself off to a brand new and literally very shiny Waitrose to carefully choose my ingredients for my no cook supper.

To start:
Salmon and smoked salmon terrine served with rocket and brown toast - yes I know that I could have made this very easily myself, but it was reduced and I could't resist!)

Main:
Spicy couscous (only a kettle needed) with lots of coriander and mint.
Coronation flavoured cold roast chicken (I say flavoured because there will be more chicken than sauce), using a cold roasted organic chicken to be shredded and mixed with pots of Waitrose coronation chicken as I couldn't cook onions and garlic to go in my own, I plan to loosen it a bit with yoghourt and tart up the zing a bit with some mango chutney and extra spices.
Delicious little green French olives.

Pudding:
Gu chocolate mouses - any excuse for a Gu.

I think it sounds yummy - I hope it will be enough.

(Edited to add)

Yes, it was enough, there's loads left. The chicken and cous cous were delicious and we were all very happy!


This is the first picture on the blog from my new camera which I really haven't used yet - I must get back in to the habit of photographing my food like I used to. The restaurants we've been to recently have had such appalling lighting that the photos have been utterly unusable.

The weekend will remain a hot food free zone. We're out with chums for lunch on Sunday at the Knutsford Wine Bar where we haven't been for a million years since we were very friendly with the former owners and I used to work for them for five minutes.

I miss my porridge and boiled eggs for breakfast!

The engineer is coming on Tuesday or hopefully on Monday and will poke the hob and no doubt tell us that it's not mendable and we'll have to spend a small fortune on a new one. Apparently the oven is okay as the first engineer came on Thursday and poke and prodded it and plugged it into things and proclaimed it good.

Mini Picture is here!!

Mini Picture has arrived in Knutsford!

Mini Pictures are 12cm square white PVC resin blocks which are 25mm (1") thick, they are scratch and water resistant and printed with Eco Solvent inks which will not fade in UV light.

Best of all, every single one has one of my photographs on it - there are pretty images, urban, themed, multiple and every combination you can think of.

At the moment they are for sale at the Canvas Lounge Gallery in Knutsford, Cheshire for just £9 for a single block - surely an ideal gift for the festive season! The shop is up and running, so if you are in the area, or know someone who is, why not pop in and have a look?

Hopefully I'll be adding the blocks to my Etsy shop soon.

Have a Seat

I photographed this beauty when I was out working with mum in deepest flattest Lincolnshire, we'd just visited a charming man in a filthy recycling depot and on the way out through the thick mud on the endless bumpy drive I spotted this poor abandoned seat - I like to imagine that some of the staff there would take a seat, have a breather and watch the landscape and that it isn't destined for the skip too soon.....

I've made a new Blurb Book!

I was suddenly and unexpectedly inspired this afternoon to make a new book on Blurb.

The title of my new opus is 'Abandoned Christmas Trees', I've quite a nice little collection which I shot mainly at the start of 2009 with a couple as recently as August so I've worked on them a little and I can proudly present my new book:

Abandoned Chri...

By Sarah Franklin

Book Preview

It's 56 pages long, with an image wrap hard cover and on Blurb's special Premium Paper, I've just ordered my own copy with Express Delivery using a 50% off promotion so I'll definitely have it by the 24th.

I think it looks great and if you click on the image above, you'll go straight to my Blurb Bookstore where you can view a full preview and (hopefully) treat yourself to an alternative Christmas book.

Revisiting Morocco for Getty

Time for a quick blog post with this lovely Treasury from Masaoms who bought one of my 2010 Calendars last week, so a double thanks to her in lovely Barcelona! I have no idea which song she's referring to which could inspire a picture of a bicycle, a chalk board and a beautiful big green ring, so I'd better do a bit of research.

Inspired by Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johanssen Song
by Masaoms

I'm causing all sorts of glitches on my computer by uploading massive scanned Holga images to the Flickr/Getty site. Out of my latest sumbissions from September and October they are interested in 48 of the pictures which is great. I've no idea what sort of numbers others are having accepted, but I'm very pleased. There are a few which require property releases which I'm never going to be able to acquire now, which is a shame as they're nice images, but there are plenty which don't need anything other than some details and in the case of the Holgas I feel that my 3mb images aren't big enough (they were fine for Flickr which is where Getty found them) so I've had to go back to my scanned TIFFS which are rather meaty, the Volubilis Triumphial Arch was a massive size at 14,0000 px square and I couldn't export it so I reduced it to a more sensible 7,000 px square and re-tweaked it and cleaned it up a bit more.

The Essaouira Fishing Boats needed to be flipped as the film rebate and the numbers on the boats were reading back to front (oops!) so I need to change my print template and listing details too.



The upload process is slooooow for these big pics so here I am having a minor blog moment.

Dr Who Treasury and New Camera.

It's been one of those fallow Treasury phases for a while now, so I was very relieved to see this nice nerdy number this morning with my Dalek print along with more cool Dr Who stuff. We watched the watery episode the other night and it has whetted my appetite for the Christmas special where David Tennant's Dr will disappear forever......

Dr WhoooOOooo..HEY! Dr Who.
By K C Burk

I'm off to the gym in a minute and I've decided to have my first 'run' for months, I hope I survive it. I'll only be on the treadmill where I can be suitably cautious and I'm quite looking forward to it as I have missed it, the crosstrainer, while being fun and a great calorie burner just doesn't have the same satisfaction value.

I finally got my act together and bought my happy-snappy camera and here it is - the Panasonic Lumix FX60, it's a cute little thing with a lovely satin finish, far too many daft pre-set scene options (with a rather cool pin-hole one), and all sorts of bits and pieces I'm sure I won't use, but it's spec is good and I'll be looking forward to having a camera on hand at all times again as I've missed many opportunites in the recent past. My Birthday Banners collection has particularly suffered and I'm pleased that the next time I see one somewhere vaguely accessable, I'll be able to get a snap of it.

What a happy sight!

....A pile of five desk calenders in cases all printed, cut, made up, wrapped and ready to go!

I've sold one to Barcelona, one to Finland and four to my mum (which still counts!).

When I started to make them I realised that I had really messed up the sizes - precision never was my strong point! I faffed around trying to make it better, but it just got worse and worse and trimming each individual page by hand just wasn't fun. So I did what I should have done in the first place and set up a proper Master Page and started from scratch. Then it worked perfectly and I was happy and my printer was churning out sheets of Super A3 as fast as it could and my super sharp scalpel skimmed over my crop marks and we were done. Wrapped, packed and two posted.

The flat is, yet again, resembling a bomb site as loads of stuff which we'd been storing at mum's has now come back here to torment us. It's everywhere, boxes and boxes of stuff, my old school trunk, clothes which I don't wear but don't want to chuck out (Ebay is calling), my long ignored violin and even my lacrosse stick. And we have people coming for supper and here I am blogging with about 40 minutes to arrival. The Chinese red braised lamb shanks are slowly turning suculent and sticky in the oven and smelling divine, the spuds are in a big pot of water waiting to be turned to smooth and creamy mash, there's a pile of green veg to be plunged into a pan of boiling water, then we're ready to go. To start we've a spicy prawn cocktail with a coconut dressing and to finish, I'm admitting to a cheat and serving a Gu Torte, which is far better than anything I could have managed in my super busy day today, so I shall not feel guilty.

It's the Etsy Made in Manchester meeting tomorrow morning, there will only be three of us but we have decided to go ahead and have a gossip and lots of tea, it's always nice to have a catch up. Then there's a lunch at Al Faisal's with various friends and then I have every intention to get to Jacobs to purchase a new happy-snappy camera as I really don't like not having one on me all the time and I am convinced that I have missed hundreds of shots in my happy-snappyless time.

Then there's a birthday party in the evening, then on Sunday lunch at mum's for the first time in her temporary for six months flat. I hope she's worked out how to use the oven, dad's up for a few days too.

Print your own 2010 Eyeshoot Calendar.

After much faffing and putting aside of the whole thing, I've finally finished and listed the Print Your Own version of my 2010 calendar. I've still not sold one yet, which is slightly offputting, but there you go. Hopefully this will change all of that!

I've made the layout so that it can be printed on both A4 and nice and conveniently on US Letter for my lovely American customers. I wonder what the standard paper size is across Europe, I've never thought about it.

The images are exactly the same as for the main calendar which comes in the case and I really hope that someone likes it.....

Print your own Eyeshoot 2010 Calendar - A bargain $10

Click here to buy without going to Etsy.