Daifuku | a small Japanese dessert

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, view from Sentosa 2015

View from Sentosa.
Text © CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

Clarissa sat at the table with five other persons, to a Japanese lunch. She noted the interest of a friend to the family, a suitor, in the family daughter. The suitor had for some years ago, gone on a parent approved date (in Asian tradition of chaperoning) with the daughter. It had been some years in-between, but the suitor felt as if nothing had changed between he and the daughter of the family. So time was of no barrier. He felt they could carry on the conversation from where they had left off some more than a decade ago. He was about to leave the bright city lights of his home country for a new one. The new country being nothing short of a paradise island located in the crystal blue oceans of the Caribbean. He was to be there for at least a year, and most everything of his essentials were contracted to be looked after by the company that was sending him on this expatriate assignment. Continue reading “Daifuku | a small Japanese dessert” →

Carnation | dianthus caryophyllus

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Ava Gardner by Arnold Newman 1949

Ava Gardner by Arnold Newman 1949.
Text © CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

It was a wedding. A cousin’s. It happened that Ava had clean forgotten to turn off the gas stove. Ava and her husband were both already in the car on their way to church, but realising this, she turned to her husband to ask him to turn the car around. It would take just a few minutes to get the task done. But Ava’s husband was not in the mood. She could register his rising irritation by the second, “How could you be so careless?” he bellowed, “It’s just like you isn’t it, Ava! Careless and forgetful!” Continue reading “Carnation | dianthus caryophyllus” →

Sweet sticky cupcakes

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro 2015, pulot hitam

Red bean, black glutinous rice pudding (bubur pulut hitam) with coconut cream (santan). This pudding was made with one part black glutinous rice and one part red beans. The beans were boiled, sweetened and mashed into a paste before they were added into the rice pudding.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

The granddaughter, now in her early twenties, watched her grandmother prepare the batter of a mixture of white glutinous rice flour, tapioca flour, a pinch of salt and a pinch of yeast etcetera, for a sweet and sticky Asian cupcake. It was humid outdoors and this was something to look forward to with light tea, in the cool of the patio on the rattan settee outdoors, overlooking the small but tidy garden. Continue reading “Sweet sticky cupcakes” →

Be still, my beating heart!

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Literature from the period of Restoration England and their unsentimental comedies of the heart ironically hold one of my favourite quotations of all time. The expression of ‘beating hearts’ has had for centuries, since the late 1600s with the works of John Dryden in his The works of Virgil, been associated with the excitement and rush of adrenaline that comes with the seeing of and the taking of contact with the object of one’s amorous affections. William Mountfort’s Zelmane in 1705 contained the earliest citation for “be still my beating heart”.

About two centuries later, the expression was delivered in a comic manner in the fantastic fourth collaborative work of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera HMS Pinafore, 1878, when a lowly sailor Ralph, falls in love with the Captain’s daughter, Josephine.

Ralph:
Aye, even though Jove’s armoury were launched at the head of the audacious mortal whose lips, unhallowed by relationship, dared to breathe that precious word, yet would I breathe it once, and then perchance be silent vermore. Josephine, in one brief breath I will concentrate the hopes, the doubts, the anxious fears of six weary months. Josephine, I am a British sailor, and I love you!

Jospehine:
Sir, this audacity!
(Aside.) Oh, my heart, my beating heart!
(Aloud.) This unwarrantable presumption on the part of a common sailor!

The story turns dramatic when the Captain’s daughter in her due social rank is promised by her Captain father to a Cabinet Minister, Sir Joseph.

But as with most Gilbert and Sullivan stories, where “nothing is as it seems” and “love levels all ranks”, a twist by the end of the story lends a happy ending to all.

Closely intertwined with the romancing of hearts and souls this Valentine’s Day is the idea of a warm candlelit dinner in the heart of some place cozy…

Here, in celebration of friendship and love…a St. Valentine’s menu suggestion.

Happy Valentine’s Day to All!