Just apple Apfelstrudel

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Filled with just apples and cinnamon, Apfelstrudel.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

Apples are generally a late summer harvest in Scandinavia, where in west coast Sweden, Signe Tillisch and the Red Ingrid Marie are varieties that can be found in plenty of home gardens.

There are many recipes to apfelstrudel in cookbooks and the internet on what goes into such an excellent creation, where finding your favourite combination of recipes for your perfect strudel is a matter of search and retrieve at your fingertips. This here is mostly a photo blog on the making of apfelstrudel with, just apples.

The trick to Phyllo pastry is to get it paper-thin. This here is almost there, with more stretching of the dough to come.

I contemplated between using puff pastry or phyllo pastry, where in this making of apple strudel, I tried with phyllo. It was a single large sheet of unleavened flour dough that was subsequently rolled around the apples to create layers.

The apple sauce was made with at least two varieties of Swedish apples. On top of the apple sauce, some green Granny Smiths dusted over with cinnamon.

A cheese cloth or linen helps in the rolling.

Brushing over with butter, to help in the browning.

Vents, to help in the baking and the decorative look of the strudel.

Once baked and out of the oven, a dusting over of icing sugar.

For afternoon tea.

This strudel was baked for about 45 minutes in a Bertazzoni at c. 175C. I wanted time enough for the cut apples to soften and the apple sauce a little of a smother over the phyllo when served.

A completely different palate of taste compared to the phyllo pastries for triangularly shaped curry puffs back in Singapore, but there again it was those curry puffs, these days sold only in spsecific coffeeshops in Singapore, that had first led to my love of phyllo pastries, the result of which was this prelapsarian apfelstrudel.

Early summer in vintage

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In the early summer sun.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

It was in 2010 that Marc Jacobs brought nostalgia with hints of the 70s back into fashion, hot on the runways. Today in 2012, the the flavour of the 70s are still in on the runways from Diesel to Halston, whilst Louis Vuitton Fall 2012 makes romantic the long train voyages of the 1920s in reminiscence of a time that was in reality, filled with great uncertainty – such is the magic of fashion, to take viewers into a completely different world, even if briefly.
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The evolving Tao of language

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Photo and Text © Alen Cordic, C Cordeiro-Nilsson 2012

In the midst of preparing an academic paper for an upcoming Yin Yang themed conference at the Stockholm University School of Business, I as usual got sidetracked into other interesting reads. This time one by L.H. Wee[1], on how Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) helps build Singapore’s national identity.

Growing up in a Eurasian family in Singapore[2], there were many on my father’s side who worked as civil servants, mostly within the British administration system, English being their mother tongue and language at work. I always marveled at how very proper their spoken English sounded but never thought much of it.

Eventually when I started school at the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus[3], I noticed that not all classmates of mine had English as first language, and the fact that my paternal grandparents spoke English with Received Pronunciation, became more of a dismay to me than anything else, since the English my friends spoke outside of the speech and drama classes from the Nuns, was different.

It was so different that it included words that didn’t even belong to English at all. I was a bit confused but tried to keep this ‘other’ language secret from my grandparents and other aunts and uncles who when I had slipped and spoken with a more Hokkien influenced English intonation, had rapped my knuckles followed by disapproving clicks of their tongue, tsk tsk…

Still, there was no stopping learning this ‘bad English’ at school, because socializing across cultures meant that a common language was needed in order to be part of the group, whether it was playing games or buying food at the canteen.

This ‘bad English’ was of course my first encounter with SCE or Singlish.
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The Blue Frog, Shanghai World Financial Center SWFC

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The Blue Frog restaurant, Shanghai World Financial Center.

The Blue Frog at the Shanghai World Financial Center.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

Even before my first visit to Shanghai, friends were recommending I visit two places, the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Blue Frog restaurant that as a friend put it, served “very good fusion food”. And I couldn’t have done serendipitously better than by dining at the Blue Frog at the Shanghai World Financial Center!
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The Cinderella Diamond Ring

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‘The World’s First Diamond Ring’ by Shawish Jewellery, Geneva.
Text © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

Anyone with a latent interest for absurdly expensive things would have noted the Shawesh brothers of the the Swiss Shawish Jewellery company unveil their 150 carat laser-cut ‘all diamond’ ring at the recent prestigious BASELWORLD watch and jewellery event in Zürich, 2012. Their actions, at a time when world news is dismal with civil unrest and a massive earthquake hitting Indonesia, that brings forth uncomfortable memories, in a stroke of genius in their world, re-defined the concept of something as superfluous as a ‘diamond ring’.

Even with modern techniques, the cutting and polishing of a regular diamond crystal would result in approximately 50% loss of its weight. With this ring from Shawish Geneva the staggering weight loss in itself would break the hearts of many brides-to-be.

But therein lies the very definition of luxury from the point of view of the surreal.
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Barcelona revisited – Sunday sopa de llenties

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Spanish lentil soup, a keepsake from Barcelona.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

My favorite souvenir to bring back from places I have visited is actually the food.

Not only all the local specialties I can fit into my luggage and hope will survive the trip back, but the smell, the flavours and that particular piece of memory and history they contain, that could so easily be revived over and over again at the stove back home.

This weekend I was thinking about Barcelona, that will always have a special place in my heart.

If you walk down La Rambla from the Placa de Catalunya and resist the temptation to turn left into the Barri Gótic just for once, to get lost in the myriads of picturesque back alleys and squares that endlessly lead you round and around in the search for the perfect xocolata you had yesterday, just somewhere around here … and instead carry on, down past the familiar facade of La Boqueria wet market, and turn right, about there, you will soon find yourself inside the bohemian turned pretty posh quarters of El Raval.

There, immediately before you hit the open area of Rambla del Raval, you will find Casa Leopoldo.
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From west Sweden to northwest Italy: Swedish Mussel soup with a touch of Italian Vermentino from Liguria

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Creamy west Swedish blue mussel soup laced with Vermentino an Italian white wine – a toast and celebration of the friendly relations between Sweden and Italy – whether at a Swedish Royal gala dinner for trade or in more politically shared interests regarding developments in the Middle East organized at the Second Aspen Bosphorus Dialogue Conference by the Aspen Institute Italia, 2-3 March 2012.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

It was after work and I had my mind on the topics covered at a recent seminar held at the Aspen Institute Italia on Leadership, Globalization and the Quest for Common Values held earlier in March 2012 in beautiful and panoramic Cernobbio nonetheless, where ideas were exchanged on leadership for the twenty-first century. Just 40 km north of Milan, Cernobbio is the city that is home to the luxury hotel Villa d’Este that sits along the shores of Lake Como. The city was also host to a seminar that allowed for various interpretations to be heard on the complexities of leadership in the modern, globalized world and how tensions in leadership could be addressed.

Half absent in mind at the wet market, I scanned flittingly over the different types of raw seafood that west Sweden is so well known for when my eyes came to settle on some very lovely blue mussels.
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Swedish west coast winds that set sails luffing!

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Wearing mostly vintage. Arden B. knitted top, vintage nautical belt and white cotton skirt with hand embroidered florals, also vintage.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

Windy! Typical at this time of year along the Swedish west coast, though nowhere near warm…The glow of the sun – thoroughly inviting!
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The Swedish culture of denial

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For the part of the world who have found it a point to notice that there is such a country as Sweden – at some distance easily mixed up with Switzerland – Sweden might appear as somewhat of an ideal state of equality, untroubled by racial riots and religious taboos.

On close encounter a different picture emerges that speaks about a state of denial that have grown into a culture of its own. In a time when globalization is increasingly becoming a non-issue, when through the Internet Syria is as close as Malmö, this phenomenon might become a problem. The problem, being that the wider meaning of the word ‘culture’ in Sweden has been obscured and cemented into oblivion so much that there are almost no words there to talk about the fact that values, beliefs, religions and various ideas about what is right or wrong are different in different parts of the world.

Defining culture

In the early 2000s when I began to prepare my research for my doctoral thesis in the field of managing across cultures and leadership across cultures, it appeared that almost every author touching upon the topic of culture had come up with a definition of their own. Already during the 1950s, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn had compiled a list of 164 definitions. The definitions spanned fine arts and humanities, pattern of human knowledge, beliefs and behavior, shared attitudes, values, goals and practices. Everything from cultivating small societies of bacteria in a Petri dish to my favourite, Geert Hofstede, who defined culture as a ‘collective programming of the mind’. It appeared that the only common ground was the agreement that there was such a thing as culture and in its broader sense all were the creations of man to fit in between them and what was given by nature to make just about any place on earth inhabitable. Thus, of course, any “culture” would vary with the places and be whatever served its purpose best at that place.

This wider definition made for three simple observations:

  1. There is such a thing as culture
  2. They vary with their geographical location
  3. Their usefulness will vary since what is useful in one place will be plain stupid in another

What we arrive at in the most secular country in the world is however, the contradiction that the Swedes do not believe in the thesis of Greek philosopher Protagoras, that “man is the measure of all things” but would much rather go with the Old Testament’s belief in absolute truths, that what is true to one man is true to all.

When I went on in the course of my research and talked to Swedish top managers about their “management style”, asking if they felt that their ‘style’ would broadly correspond to the “Swedish culture and values” most Swedes would have it that there did not exist any particular Swedish management style, and certainly no framework of a Swedish national culture that influenced this non-existent “Swedish management style”.
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A personal luxury – Raspberry Cardamom ice-cream

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The first ice-cream of the household for 2012 in Spring – Raspberry Cardamom.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

If there ever were a reflected change in values from one generation to the next, in my life, I can find no better example than that of the attitude towards cooking.

In the hierarchic familial structure of the Asian society, the activity of cooking was invariably bound to the social pecking order in the family. Either the eldest, the youngest or the ‘least favoured’ of children was often given the task of cooking for, the usually, large family. Cooking could also be parceled out as a kind of punishment to children, to be ‘kitchen bound’, instead of being allowed to go outdoors to play with your friends after school or worse, on weekends.
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