Alice and the Caterpillar

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Illustrated by John Tenniel.

It was soon that Alice found herself in front of the Caterpillar again. Instead of waiting patiently first for him to speak, she ventured a step forward to the mushroom where he usually sat, in a swirling cloud of smoke.

“Caterpillar, I think I can answer your question now on who are you?”

“I know who I am, there is no need for you to tell me.” The Caterpillar replied indignantly, even if with patience.

“I meant your question, to me from fore – who are you?” Alice tried again. The Caterpillar remained silent, and at this point Alice didn’t quite know if it was because he was inhaling on his hookah that he didn’t respond of if he had lost sight of her that he was not responding. “It is not the question of who are you, but what are you actua –” Continue reading “Alice and the Caterpillar” →

Back to basics

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, home baked mixed wheat bread.

Homebaked bread, served with butter and sea salt.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

The phenomenon of no-knead bread began to grow in popularity in the mid-2000s in address to the lack of time people had to spend in home kitchens. Today there are about 1.6M hits on google for no-knead bread recipes, including one of my favourites by Mark Bittman simply entitled No Knead Bread from 2006 [1] when he worked with The New York Times (NYT) writing on food. That NYT video upload featuring Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan showed how breads could easily be baked without too much work, plopped into a cast iron pot, which I did for mine right here.

I had likewise as Jim Lahey from the 2006 video, used a three-ingredient bread recipe of yeast, flour and water. The difference however is that I liked kneading the dough, bringing out its gluten in the protein strands. That and, I had also used three different types of flours for this bread in a pot.

Pick up any flour package from the Swedish grocery stores and you’ll find on the side of that package, a recipe and instructions to baking a couple of loaves of bread using that flour. The recommended kneading time Continue reading “Back to basics” →

Marketplaces: converging inspirations

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Saluhallen Västerås

Saluhallen Slakteriet, Västerås, Sweden.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

Whilst the field of transdisciplinary research contemplates the effectiveness of the use of metaphors as a means to transcend boundaries between different fields of academic research, walk the streets of Västerås on a sightsee tour and you’ll find anything but the use of metaphors in street names or buildings, the sign designating the name of the road being metaphor enough. There is one skyscraper in the entire city, and that is aptly called, ‘The Skyscraper’. This weekend, I had the opportunity to go a little farther out of the city centre to the former abattoir, to a farmer’s market called ‘The Market Slaughterhouse’. You’ll find this market right next to the city’s landmark energy plant in the midst of a romantic industrial setting. Most street and building names are so straightly connected to the city’s power and energy industrial roots that one might come to think that the effort of keeping things in two dimensional vectors was considered effort enough in deployment of metaphor in itself.

Having observed two vector namings in three dimensional space, entering Saluhallen Slakteriet came as a surprise visual Continue reading “Marketplaces: converging inspirations” →

Around the river Limmat, Zürich, Switzerland

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Zürich Switzerland

Standing at the bank of the river Limmat with Fraumünster Church in the background.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

The oldest parts of the city of Zürich is just a couple of minutes walk from the central station. With just about a few hours to spend in Zürich, I think my favourite thing to do would be to plan some points of interest to visit and then make time for some coffee, sitting in a café by the river Limmat. On a brilliant day, the crowds gather to sit outdoors for late breakfast all through high tea. There is no lacking of culinary genius from Swiss bakeries and cafés, that makes for interesting points of conversation in terms of the influence of foods and peoples in the city’s long history.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Zürich Switzerland

A familiar view on most city rivers, ferries on rivers.

Continue reading “Around the river Limmat, Zürich, Switzerland” →

Time in circles, Baden, Switzerland

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Baden, Switzerland

View from the top of the Stein Castle ruin, whose foundations were laid some time before the 1100s.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

It was about a decade ago that I sat in the Singapore regional headquarters office of a Swedish owned multinational enterprise, speaking with its Managing Director. The topic was about the general managing of conflicts within the organisation, when we touched upon the concept of Time, and whether that was viewed in linearity:

$1: what happens if you disagree
$2: well you tell / you tell and eventually you do agree / because all disagreements end with an agreement if you’re lucky / or you become / enemies /
$1: do swedes generally see time as a straight line
$2: well no / i would see it as a circle / my time is a circle / i have no idea what others do / and strangely enough that the year and the day / goes in different directions /
$1: is that [understanding of time] a result of [an understanding of a certain philosophy] or
$2: i have no idea / if christmas is six oclock then april is three oclock / and summer is noon / october is nine oclock / but if you’re asking if we are on time or not / yes we are

Baden is a town with a long history. A history that you are made aware of as you walk its small, winding cobbled streets from the banks of the the river Limmat Continue reading “Time in circles, Baden, Switzerland” →

Cadenhead’s in Baden, Switzerland

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Baden, Switzerland

Astrid Bach, explaining the different whiskies in specialist whiskey importer Peter Siegenthaler’s shop, Cadenhead’s in Baden, Switzerland. William Cadenhead Ltd, established in 1842 is Scotland’s oldest independent bottler, the joy of which is that one can bring home a Cadenhead’s right here from the heart of the historic town of Baden.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

In the heart of the old town of Baden, Switzerland, in a corner of Mittleren Gasse, the rich variations of bottled liquid amber reflecting in the sunlight through the glass window display caught my eye. I had in the past few days, tried to visit this shop that seemed to close minutes before I stepped by in the evenings. So I was more than delighted that on this day, I could swing open the door and step into Cadenhead’s.

It was Astrid Bach who greeted me as I stepped in through the door. I took a long sweeping look around the shop. Delighted at what I saw, I turned to her and asked, “Do you have Eiswein?”

My question was greeted with a polite perplexed look on her face. The reason for her perplexity as I found out later was that the shop that belonged to Peter Siegenthaler, the sole importer for Cadenhead Scottish distilled whiskies into Switzerland, sold “alles ausser Wein”. I looked at Astrid in brief pause, smiled and said, “I guess I’m here to buy a whiskey.” And so began an early evening adventure on the different types of Cadenhead whiskies. Continue reading “Cadenhead’s in Baden, Switzerland” →

Life speeds up when you slow down

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, lingonsylt

At market today, fresh lingonberries to make a batch of traditional Swedish lingonberry jam or lingonsylt.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

I have now watched with interest, several documentaries on individuals who have chosen to live alternative lifestyles. These documentaries feature individuals with a different type of life philosophy, where some for example choose not to own any property but rather live in a vehicle that gives them the freedom of adventure and of getting in touch with themselves whilst on the road. Others featured spoke thoughtfully on how individuals in society often did what others wanted and expected of them and not what they wanted themselves. They chose a different way of living in order to do something for themselves. These documentaries then reminded me of a paragraph in the book Walden, written by Henry David Thoreau in 1854:

“Most men even in this comparatively free country through mere ignorance and mistake are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers from excessive toil are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance which his growth requires who has so often to use Continue reading “Life speeds up when you slow down” →

Muscovado carrot cake

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

A small weekend indulgence both in the baking and eating, of that carrot cake.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

I wanted a moist cake that for the first time in a long time, was not double chocolate. As autumn rolls around, harvests of various root vegetables are abundant, which makes it a perfect opportunity to bake something out of them. Carrot cake, with a warm mixture of ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg seemed to be the perfect autumn harvest crave and I set about in my weekend indulgence of baking one.

While it seems that many might consider no cream cheese frosting atop a carrot cake as a loss of the culinary experience of eating that cake, my personal preference has often been to skip the frosting, else reduce the overall portion of sugar in any given recipe.

I made several small changes to the standard carrot cake recipe where I used butter instead of cooking oil, left out any kind of nuts, used fresh grated ginger, and chose to use muscovado sugar in complement to the mixture of warm spices.

Once out of the oven, I topped this dark, sweet and richly spiced cake with one of my favourite things, plain whipped cream. A quick grating of some lemon zest over the whipped cream and it was good to be enjoyed with a favourite drink on an autumn weekend. Continue reading “Muscovado carrot cake” →

Weekend farmers market, Västerås

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Farmers market, Västerås

This piece of public art, the ASEA stream, depicts people cycling to work. It sits by Stora Torget and is the creation of Västerås artist B G Broström. Cycling remains one of the preferred means of transport in this city.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

The move from Gothenburg to Västerås in Sweden with a brief visit to Maastricht in Netherlands prior to Västerås is surreal. It is not only that these two cities are one of the oldest in Europe dating back to 1000 AD or earlier, but their size and layout are fairly comparable. Both cities are best reached by train, and both have its city centre close to the train station that is navigable on foot, with having a bicycle making navigation a notch more efficient on their cobble paved streets. In the case of Västerås, one can literally see the undulations of the cobbled streets from the inner-city radiating outwards from the river. Reminiscent of the structures of Rome (although less fantastic), newer constructions in Västerås have been built upon older constructions, making the newer parts of the city sit on higher ground.

As weekend unfurls, the city comes to life most prominently with a weekend farmers market located at Stora Torget. The large square that hosts the market place sits in the oldest quarters at the heart of town, just alongside Svartån and a block away from the three Michelin Guide starred Västerås Domkyrka that is also one of Sweden’s episcopal see. Continue reading “Weekend farmers market, Västerås” →