WIP development - how do you mimic the Dutch masters with artificial lighting and on a budget

Since I already had an idea of how to do my images - the first point was to mimic the Dutch masters - I decided to go for something easy and to try and do something I have never done before. The idea was to use a simple dish - in my case that was Shopska salad (quite a traditional dish on the Balkans, made out of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onion and a lot of white cheese) - and to try and create something that looks like a Dutch still life. 

The setting was created on the living room table since the living room is the darkest one at home. I planned to do something I have never done before - in my case try new style and composition AND use artificial lighting. I am much more used to working with natural light - when I had to take pics for Shutterstock, natural light was the only thing I used. However, the challenge set by Michelle involved me taking some kind of a risk so that I manage to push myself a bit. 

As a start, it turned out that working with artificial lighting may give you all the control but when you have no idea what you want to achieve (apart from some vague image in your head), things can get complicated. So it took me around an hour to figure out what I wanted to depict and a few more minutes to set up the whole thing.

The end result truly looked like nothing I have done before - new type of background (for years, I had been avoiding the dark backgrounds), new type of composition as I tried to mimic the Dutch still life type of compo and a whole new concept of how I should be doing my images. 

I chose the salad and the glass to show a typical farmer's dinner at the local tavern (hence the yellow liquid that is actually mint tea since we had no rakiya at home). Took me a lot of time to figure out how to do the lighting so that the glass is lit from above and I have some kind of tecture (first time working with that light). 

I tried a few angles, such as this one:

Even though I liked the end result, the whole thing looked so different from what I used to create, that it was a bit foreign to me. I did the challenge BUT somehow couldn't feel the image. What was worse, I still lacked some ideas on how to do the rest of the images. 

As my mother exclaimed when I showed her the images - they simply looked dull in some way. Well. the point was to challenge myself and so I did but the overall concept was completely eluding me.