Author: doodledweller
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Culturally Verbal
It is well accepted that the environment influences culture and language. We develop words for objects, build habits and beliefs based on the phenomena observed around us. The brain learns and forms its understanding of the world upon this information. Speech and language are so interwoven into our mind that it feels impossible to separate…
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Bilingual
I once met a girl who spoke four languages. I asked her how she kept them all straight in her head. Smoke puffing out from her lips, she admitted that it was getting very full, and that she didn’t think she could hold any more words in there. I told her that I didn’t know…
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Pickles
Pickling is among the simplest and quickest approaches to fermentation. It is mostly utilized for vegetables, where they are submerged in a brine along with herbs and spices of choice. As they are left to ferment, existing lactic acid cultures develop to give the vegetables and the brine a pleasantly sour taste. They are ready…
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Salt Cured, III
Like fermentation, curing is a method to preserve food without the need for heat. However, whereas fermentation takes advantage of good microbes to keep food safe for eating, curing prevents bacteria from entering it at all. Both methods result in food’s physical and chemical transformation – fermentation with the aid of external microbes, and curing…
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Natto
Last year, I made tempeh, a fermented soybean from Indonesia. It is a quick ferment, ready within 48 hours. The mold to ferment tempeh is rhizopus oryzae, which is also used to make Mao tofu, a delicacy of the Anhui province of China. This summer, I made natto, another quick ferment soybean from Japan. The…
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Drawing
Adult coloring books have been a thing since a few years. These are of intricate details and repetitive patterns, designed to induce calmness and zen for stressed out and anxious adults. Else, they can surely alleviate boredom for a few hours. They are compelling reasons to pick up the pencils, regardless of one’s ability to…
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Kintsugi
Alfie is a play adapted into film in 1966, and again in 2004. As a young woman, I loved this movie for its witty lines and beautiful characters, namely the womanizer that is Alfie. What’s Alfie like? Listen to his impression upon Aphrodite, “beautiful she was; perfect female form; chiseled features; exquisite. I stood in…
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Ikigai
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the Japanese concept ikigai as “a motivating force; something or someone that gives a person a sense of purpose or a reason for living”. It is to give meaning to life, a raison d’être. Here, we have furthered it into a venn diagram consisting of four circles: what the world…
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Discourse on Happiness
Happiness is a popular and well-studied field in the US. As Americans, we care about our happiness a lot. The right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is written into our declaration of independence. We’re inclined to think that everyone else does, too, but the pursuit of happiness is not a universal pursuit. …
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Kvas
The first time I tasted kvas was in the city of Yekaterinburg in Russia’s Siberia. It was a perfect thirst quencher for a sunny and moist summer day. How hot can it really get in Siberia at such high latitudes? -but that it is landlocked allows its summer temperatures to rise to a sizzling 90’s…
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