Born in the vibrant city of Singapore with a unique Eurasian blend of Portuguese and Chinese heritage, my journey has taken me from the bustling streets of Singapore to the serene and open landscapes of Sweden. My educational pursuits in Singapore culminated at tertiary level with two separate Master degrees, after which I embarked on a new adventure in 2002, moving to Sweden. In Sweden, I pursued with deep interest, the knowledge field of applied linguistics, particularly corpus linguistics research methods, earning a doctoral degree from one of northern Europe’s largest universities, the University of Gothenburg. I currently work as Project Manager, focusing on EU and international projects, at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, at the Division of Bioeconomy and Health, Department of Agriculture and Food. My office is located in Mölndal municipality. Mölndal, known also as the Valley of Mills, is located about ten minutes by bus ride from the city center of Gothenburg to the south. If you’re ever traveling south from Gothenburg to Malmö, whether by train or car, you will likely come by Mölndal municipality. In these pages at cmariec.com, you’ll find my lifestyle musings on culinary and travel adventures from Singapore to Sweden, and from when I lived and worked the Arctic City of Tromsø (2018 to mid-2022). SINGAPORE | SWEDEN | NORTHERN NORWAY Life in Singapore Pursued all academic interests in Singapore, of which the post-graduate years were founded in two separate disciplines. In 2000, graduated with two separate Masters Degrees: (i) Master of Science in Information Studies at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore (ii) Master of Arts in the English Language at the National University of Singapore (NUS). In 1999, represented the Republic of Singapore at the Miss Universe Pageant in Trinidad and Tobago. With this came a variety of film, educational TV, media, and ambassadorial work for the Singapore Tourism Board. Life in Sweden In 2002, moved from Singapore to Sweden in order to pursue a PhD in Gothenburg, where a number of international corporate head offices were located that all had a substantial business presence in Singapore and also Asia in general. In 2009, graduated with a PhD in applied critical linguistics from the faculty of humanities at the University of Gothenburg, with a cross-disciplinary thesis entitled, Swedish management in Singapore: a discourse analysis study, looking particularly into the concepts of assimilation, integration and hierarchy, at top management levels of Swedish-Asian corporations in Singapore. 2013, as research fellow at the Centre for International Business Studies (CIBS), School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, researching the future implications of increasing Asian-Swedish cooperation within the field of international business. The project is entitled Gothenburg in Asia, Asia in Gothenburg, funded by the Anna Ahrenberg Foundation. The project is aligned with the 400 years anniversary of the city of Gothenburg in 2021, and falls under the broad category of Kunskap Göteborg 2021 initiated by city representatives of Gothenburg, Göteborg & Co, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology. 2015, was granted the Flexit post-doctoral scholarship by Bank of Sweden Tercentennary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, RJ) for a three year project together with the Swedish-Swiss multinational enterprise ABB. From 2015-17, the research will take place at ABB Corporate Research Sweden HQ in Västerås, and at CIBS during 2017-18. The research focus of the project is how new technologies are perceived and accepted by users and customers, using linguistic methods of data analysis. More information can be found at RJ’s website, at Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) Felxit 2015. Life in Northern Norway (2018-2022) 2018, late summer. I acquired new work as Market Scientist at Nofima. Having moved to the county of Troms in August, I’m currently enjoying myself, exploring the island city of Tromsø. From the 1900s, this city became known as Paris of the North due to how the people of Tromsø were exceptionally stylish and sophisticated in contrast to the fishing village preconception that many might have of a city located in the Arctic Circle. In my years in Sweden, I have known Sweden to be called the land of the midnight sun. During the long summer mights, it was beautiful to sit and watch the sun’s languid pendulation between east and west, touching the horizon out at sea before going up again. Northern Norway takes this languid pendulation of the sun to the extreme. It is not only known as the land of the midnight sun, but it is also the land of polar nights and the northern lights. This is my new adventure. And in these lifestyle blog pages, you’ll find my personal thoughts, insights and musings. Cheryl Marie Cordeiro | PhD MSc MA ACADEMIC REFLECTIONS | CV LIFESTYLE BLOG

Swedish west coast Harbour Festival, Donsö 2011

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Donsö Hamnfest 2011.

The perfect weekend thing to do – picking up both old and new finds at the annual Donsö Harbour Festival in the Swedish west coast archipelago of Gothenburg.
Photos JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

There’s a distinct feel in the air in the past week that the summer that has lingered through the months of July and now August, is beginning to wind down. Though the air is still warm, there’s a chill in the evening breeze that indicate the cold weather that is to come from end of November, carrying on with the months thereafter.

So what better time of the year than right now to celebrate with a little Harbour Festival at Donsö, in the Southern Archipelago of Gothenburg?

Just about 16 km south of the city of Gothenburg, Donsö is one of the larger islands. With its about 1,500 inhabitants, Donsö is a lively community with a bustling business of shipping and ship owning and whatever services else needed to keep a modern business community going. While it is today a part of the Gothenburg municipality of Sweden, until 1974 it was a municipality of its own together with Styrsö and the neighboring islands in the archipelago.
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Audrey Kawasaki’s She, and the third aspect…

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It is difficult to put to words, the emotions that surface from within when viewing Audrey Kawasaki’s work. I can’t help but see parallels of her work to Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s pre-Raphaelite art, whose art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism – Bocca Baciata (1859) for example.

For those unfamiliar with Kawasaki, she is an LA based artist influenced by both manga comics and the Art Nouveau scene in which she grew up. The figures she paints captures and personifies an inner Lolita. Often a girl, She expresses a haunting and sensual melancholy that is sometimes avertive and sometimes daring.

I thought it marginally humourous to find that heavily pensive part of myself being reflected, even personified, in Kawasaki’s works. Admittedly, I am by far not as sultry as that She in Kawasaki’s works, still the renditions of Her gave me a interesting insight into the third aspect of a portrait, that of the Model who can often times be overlooked in the process of Interpretation, while that of the Artist and the Viewer is often taken for granted.
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A Frangelico Chocolate Fudge Cake and a sunset, at the Swedish west coast, 2011

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Frangelico Chocolate Fudge Cake

A Chocolate Fudge Cake laced with Frangelico.
JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

It is during the last weeks of July to mid-August in the southwest of Sweden that people can experience the full warmth of the summer sun. The sea water is warm and the hours of daylight stretches long into the late evenings and gives enough light to go for that evening swim, just before sunset around half past nine in the evening.
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Swedish west coast inspirations in ceramic form

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro Vävra Keramik II 098

Sitting with some of my favourite items made by Helen Kainert at her boutique studio, Vävra Keramik that is located just before Marstrand along the Swedish westcoast.
JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

Driving along the Swedish westcoast in the area of Kungälv towards Marstrand from Gothenburg, a red house with two flags at its door post with a friendly sign that said ‘pottery works’ loomed large, and we couldn’t help but pull into its sand filled driveway to check-out the creative assortment of ceramic pottery works inside, meeting with owner and artist herself, Helen Kainert.
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In the footsteps of Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer at Skagen, 2011

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Skagen 2011

At the very, very northernmost point of Denmark is Grenen, the point where the two
seas of Skagerrak and Kattegatt meet. Here you can literary stand with one foot in each sea.
JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

In a landscape of muted pastels that continued to appeal even under the grey of the rain clouds hovering above, I felt it was surprisingly heavy and tiring to walk in the shifting sand of the long beach that led up to Grenen. An aspect that might not be immediately apparent when just looking at the famous paintings by Peder Severin Krøyer of the Skagen Painters that have Grenen as a theme, just north of the northernmost fishing village Skagen at the very tip of the Danish peninsula.

Krøyer was probably the most well known of the artists that lived and worked here from the late 1870s until the turn of the century, and it is his paintings too, amongst all Skagen artists, that attract me most. In fact, a reproduction of one of his most famous paintings, Hip Hip Hurra!, of a summer party held in Michael Ancher’s garden in 1884, adorns one of our guest room walls at home. Ancher belonged to Krøyer’s circle of artist friends, though with a different temperament altogether.
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Conversations over Pulut Serikaya

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Kuih Seri Muka, Pulut Serikaya or Kuih Salat

Depending on your heritage, this kueh / kuih is known as Pulut Serikaya (Straits Chinese – Nonya), Kuih Seri Muka (Malaysian) or Kuih Salat (Indonesian). It’s a two layered dessert common in Southeast Asian cuisine, made of coconut milk custard that’s flavoured with screwpine leaves known as ‘kaya’, atop glutinous rice cooked in coconut milk. Sweet and creamy in consistency.
JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

Low summer sun on the horizon… in the kitchen along the Swedish Westcoast… sitting on some pandan leaves is a bit of Pulut Serikaya, cooled and sliced from its earlier steaming in the day.

If someone had told me that one day, I would be putting Nonya desserts such as this one on the table made with what feels like little effort, I would not have believed them. But then again, I never thought I would end up in Sweden either, ABBA being the only thing Swedish I knew of when growing up in Singapore.

From a Swedish or indeed a general western perspective, this small delicate delight is a complete unknown, from ingredients that are just barely available except through specialist Asian food stores in the big cities, to its history and tradition. Yet most anyone – given the chance to try it – sways to its alluring fragrance, and to place it with more familiar Nordic desserts, find themselves thinking of it as textured ice cream or warm pudding (if eaten immediately after steaming) for lack of closer references.

Today’s small afternoon tea treat of this kueh is the result of years of dialogue in the kitchen with my mother. From extracting the green juices of fresh pandan leaves to the making of kaya over a firewood stove, and pouring the custard over white polished glutinous rice cooked in coconut milk… the smell of it all coming together in the kitchen was pure heaven!

Through conversations with my mother, come information that in time turns to knowledge, maturing farther in time to a certain wisdom. Today’s tip from her was simple… “Next time you do this, don’t put so much coconut milk to the pulut.”

I smiled, looked at her over the now empty plate, and nodded.

A litte bit of sunshine …

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Rulltårta with red currants.

Spending summer in Sweden. A traditional Swedish rulltårta,
with red currants from the garden for a rainy summer’s afternoon.
JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

Coming from the tropics and having been in Sweden for almost a decade, I’ve known Swedish summers to have their own personalities. Right now, outside my window, the month of July in Sweden is rainy and cold. The weather report confirms too that after today, there will be … more rain.
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Enoteca de Paco Pérez, Hotel Arts Barcelona

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Enoteca, Hotel Arts, Barcelona, Spain.

Contemplating art in culinary form, through the Mediterranean perspective of Chef Paco Pérez at Enoteca, Hotel Arts Barcelona.
JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

I think Spain is one of the places where you should go today, to refresh the eyes with aspects of art, design and architecture that are cutting edge creative and new.

In the 1910-20s Spain and Barcelona were part of the movement that invented modernism, but when you visit Barcelona today, you realize that they didn’t stop there. They just went on, turning and twisting every rock they met on the road of human artistic expressions. This progression of ideas is most visible in architecture and unexpectedly, in modern culinary art.

It is also obvious that while being sat on by suffocatingly conservative forces like Generalissimo Franco and his likes for the best part of the 20th century, this vital people never stopped expressing themselves and just found new ways of doing exactly what they wanted anyway.

And while contemplating your impressions of the city of Picasso, Miro, Gaudi and Dali I can suggest no better place to sit down and enjoy an avant garde meal, building on these very traditions, than at the Enoteka de Paco Pérez at Hotel Arts in Barcelona.

Maybe enoteca is not an ideal name of the restaurant run by the El Bulli trained chef Paco Pérez, but wine is certainly an important part of the experience.

Enoteca carries the meaning of a “wine library” or a wine bar where you can try out wines by the glass, and of course the Enoteka de Paco Pérez at Hotel Arts is a little bit beyond that.

The cooking is brilliant but bordering to eccentric and somehow you sense the influences from all the artists that has made Barcelona famous. Personally I would also like to say that this is not where I would bring my friends for a dinner without asking them first what they would want from a night out.

Barcelona is so full of very good tapas bars and rustic Catalonian eateries that a restaurant that might in fact have picked up plenty of inspiration from the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, might not be a first on your Barcelona bucket list.

The ambiance also adds to the overall experience. This library of wines is reflected in the design of the place. Stacks of bottles of wines replace library books in black shelves that cover the walls.

Enoteca, Hotel Arts, Barcelona.

If you feel like you would like to try this out, the Barcelonians who also frequent this place, like to dine late, so as a jet-lagged tourist you would actually find yourself happily first in the cue in a more or less empty restaurant.

Enoteca, interior.

The dark wood and dim orange tint from the lighting of the interior of the restaurant gives a feeling of being swept away into your very own corner of the world, a comfortable cocoon of space and time, where in the next couple of hours, you’re left to explore at will, any culinary whim and fancy that the restaurant can offer!

With so much passion and wide eyed wonder at what goes on in the kitchen as was explained to us during our sitting, it was difficult for us to keep a cool front and not bounce from our table straight into the kitchen to get a glimpse first hand on how all of this was orchestrated.

Our pictures are in no way representative of what an evening here can offer but just a few random samples we don’t mind sharing.

Enoteca Tasting Menu I.

Some bread, just for a start.

Enoteca Tasting Menu II.

Besides that the presentations of the dishes were on the whole different and ingeniously combined for each dish, the ambition was as I see it, focused on bringing out the inner soul of fairly common ingredients and actually surprise you with what things you thought you knew could actually taste like.

Enoteca, wines.

The dining experience was softly overseen by your personal sommelier who suggested different wines throughout the dinner that in various ways enhanced or changed how the different dishes came out.

Enoteca Tasting Menu III.

The menu offered many opportunities to get a glimpse of what Paco Pérez’s creative directorship and artistry in the kitchen could create.

Enoteca Tasting Menu IV.

If you care to ask anyone of the friendly staff, that probably had marveled at the same thing as you did, you might find them well prepared to explain what went on in the kitchen, how each dish was put together and the techniques behind the making and presenting of the food.

Enoteca Tasting Menu V.

A dinner here takes time, interest and a sense of humour. Why humour you might say, well, ultimately food is there to be enjoyed and sometimes maybe the imaginative efforts of this extraordinary kitchen is stretched just a tiny bit too hard. The food is good, it really is good, but hey – come on – some of the dishes are there just to make you smile.

To come up with a single recommendation regarding Enoteca de Paco Pérez, I can do no better than to suggest to take the evening off and dine with the broadest of mindsets, expecting the unexpected. Sit back and enjoy the ride from beginning to end and focus on selecting your favourite wines together with the amicable help of the restaurant’s sommelier.

“Una xocolata calenta si us plau”

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro at the Museu de la Xocolata, Barcelona, Spain.

At the Chocolate Museum, just outside the kitchen where the museum holds classes on chocolate confection.
JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro Nilsson © 2011

Although Spain’s connection with Mexico in the 1500s means that cacao beans and chocolate would be as native to Spain as coconuts and pineapples are to Singapore, I must say that it still took some doing exploring the numerous cafés in Barcelona, before I settled for a favourite place of mine that served my cup of hot chocolate with an added shot of espresso in it!

If you’re a chocolate lover like me, then perhaps nobody can stop you from immediately hitting any café in sight as soon as you get off the plane in Barcelona for a cup of Spanish hot chocolate. At least, that’s what happened to me.

But with that done I brusquely encountered a cultural difference of what a cup of hot chocolate laced with espresso is in Spain.
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