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Food is Love
Thematic for the arts and festivals alike, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a fantastical comedy about marriage and lovers’ bliss, fairies, elves, and their magic juice to turn any subject into that of passion. And when one is doted upon, one is fed with love’s extravagances,“with apricots and dewberries,with purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;The…
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Going on Holidays
Recently, I rewatched this neurotic comedy, 2 Days in New York. In it, Chris Rock played Mingus, the only apparently stable character of the whole cast, which says perhaps all you need to know about the movie. There was a scene where C.R. had an imaginary dialogue with Barack Obama about Hawai’i, and it made…
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Starches
I’ve been wondering about the differences between flours and starches. Starch is processed by grinding the starch-containing tubers or seeds and then mixing the pulp with water. The resulting paste is rid of its remaining impurities and dried into a powder. Flour results from crushing raw whole grains. Pure starch has been made since Roman…
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Food is Science
Legend has it that the panettone was born from a forbidden romance in the 15th century. During a Christmas Eve feast hosted by the Duke of Milan – Ludovico il Moro, his head pastry chef burnt the dessert while stealing a kiss from a nobleman’s beautiful wife in the medieval passageway. A young scullery boy…
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Food is Art
The mimosa is brunch’s popular cocktail. Made with Champagne and orange juice, it’s named after the beautiful mimosa flower for its bright yellow hue. But did you know that there is another cocktail made in a similar manner, of Prosecco and white peach juice, called the Bellini. The story of how its name came upon…
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On Reading
There’s much concern around reading. It’s demonstrated through the anxieties around our children’s ability to read – how soon, how much, and how fast. And we’re right to be concerned. Reading is the most basic and low-cost, yet has the power to change the world. Not just about a passing school grade, but being able…
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Horn Salt
Horn salt, aka piss salt, is deer horns ground into salt, used as a leavening agent for baking. It does bewilder me to consider the first one to think of grinding antlers into powder, and then proceeded to add it to flour to be baked into flat breads and cookies, especially that it smells like…
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House of Ten Thousand Frames
They say that memory is not reliable; but it is all we have to tell the story of our life, to remind us of who we are. Whenever the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More comes on, I come back to my 8-year-old self at my friend’s house, listening over a cassette tape. The Beatles’ And I…
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February 14th
February 14th is Valentine’s day. It’s the day to celebrate love, and love is a complicated topic. Like the concept of time, the concept of love has been debated, over and over, since the dawn of time. Everyone wants to be loved, but you can’t make others love you. You can, however, learn to give…
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The Fourth Dimension
“All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages.”–William Shakespeare We perceive our world in four dimensions, constituting space and time. The first three dimensions make space, but it’s the fourth that fascinates the…
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