Posted on Jan 30, 2010 under Finding Lost Garden 寻找失落的花园, Transient Food 美食之迁 |
Last week Thursday, Mr. Yeh invited me for his younger son’s wedding. Located in the Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin with about 500 people. It was maybe the biggest Chinese wedding with the best creative Chinese dishes which I have ever seen so far in the Netherlands. It is a secret how these wonderful ‘molecular dishes’ can be put on each table in such a good planned serving time, which turned the dinner into a truly culinary time-to-be.
As the Chinese cuisinist and innovator of Chinese cuisine in the Netherlands, Mr. Yeh is well-known for his ‘molecular dishes’ with the essence of the Chinese cuisine and the serving style of the Western cuisine. In combination with wines, he turned the rich but 2-dimensional Chinese cooking into 3-dimensional and creatively sculpted amuses.
amuse (Zhenyu Yeh)
amuse (Wynand Vogel)
Although architecture and cooking are of different scales, both are creative to provide people living pleasure and need to achieve through combining the ordered ingredients. When architects make buildings and living environment, we can’t go without many plans, materials, planning, meetings, constructive and management processes. However cuisinists could combine the best art of the east and west cuisine in such an elegant and efficient way, to make a piece of sculptural and sensual art. Like this small rectangular sweet amuse which brings people real pleasure, it is almost a clone of a multi-functional urban block, but just made of caramelized layered puffs. What a real ‘yammi’!
sweet amuse (Zhenyu Yeh)
And this puffed-caramel block learns me to remember a great challenge — to make a block with secret ingredients and processes, so sweet and so little hurt for the nature……
Posted on Jan 09, 2010 under Transient Food 美食之迁 |
2010 just began the first days…… Luchtje means “little air” in Dutch, also it means soft fragrance. I thought of this word when having a coffee at an Italian cafe on the Hoogstraat.
The coffee had an elegant bitterness, even there is a far-relation in the taste with certain herbs. When sipping the coffee, I tried a cherry orange bought from a special fruitshop, which is from South China. To my surprise, the two contrasting tastes were fitting to each other so nicely. The fresh and sweety cherry orange enlighted the herby coffee. It turned into a stream of fresh air , the fresh Luchtje of 2010!
Posted on Jan 03, 2010 under Uncategorized |
小鸟－草莓－西葫芦－仙人掌花祝。
By Little Bird – Strawberry – Courgette – Cactus Flower.
Posted on Dec 26, 2009 under Slow Thoughts 慢慢想, Uncategorized |
On TV on 1st Christmas Day:
I watched a documentary in Dutch named “Beatrix, Majesteit“, which tells the personal story of the Dutch Queen Beatrix and the terrible attack on the Queen’s Day this year. You can click here and ‘laatste uitzending’ to watch). It is from the series “Teledoc”, which is a special program called for new documentaries. What I liked about it is, it made a very personal portrait of Beatrix than the normal “Your Majesty” modes. It has a lot of natural environment around people, and it follows in parallel some other female personalities in the Netherlands with the same name “Beatrix” — her “namemates”. As I haven’t lived in the Netherlands very long, I was fascinated by the episodes of the different Beatrix’s life journey, the enjoyment and struggles for their inner happiness…… Some live in the pastoral Dutch country side, some live in a city apartment, some live in an elderly house. If I may give a comment on the Dutch elderly living, which I saw from the documentary and from the elderly home in my neighborhood, I guess my parents would agree with me that the old people in the Netherlands could get up a bit earlier and make some morning taiji boxing and dances, like a lot of elderly people in China do. They will definitely gain more vital and happiness.
On BBC, Some freelance cameramen filmed some special stories of Cambodia, Nigeria and Iraq. While the camera was catching the poor children playing in the poor neigbourhoods, there is mostly very green environment and houses looking ’ecological ‘ with natural materials. Still some programs coming up here.
Venice is not having snow, but half meter overflowing water which visible from the news video… But what a joyful joke that their New Year celebration will be accompanied with a bracing swim !!?
At Qiantang River estuary, south of Shanghai, some tourist watchers were taken into the sea while observing the impressive Qiantang Tide. These kind of tragedies happen every year regularly. More safety protection in physical facilities and alarming systems would be needed. In fact, although a lot of developments are going near the seashore in China, people from cities are not coming very often to the seashore. In the future they may come more often to the seashore and learn about the rich natural value seashore and their beauty and attractiveness.
Another news there in the Qiantang Estuary Area: A lot of efforts are being done for the migrating birds, however the birds are still endangered by various reasons at the same time.
Posted on Dec 21, 2009 under Casual Walking 偶然一游, Slow Thoughts 慢慢想, Transient Food 美食之迁 |
It is snowing, since two days. The snow has made everything slow. The traffic in whole Netherlands has got some influences. No bus or tram was running tonight. A photo shows the “beeldschon” whity camouflage at the Eendrachtsplein in Rotterdam……
The cars had to ride like big snakes, very slowly in the city. How would it be on the highways?
But slow is fine, because why should you hurry on a Sunday evening? Somehow another “Slow-Walker” came into my mind, a special moment from the Beijing Olympic Games: Mr. Li Ning moved in a slow running motion around the Birdsnest to light the torch in the opening ceremony. That was in the hot summer of 2008.
Half of the evening I was taken into a film called New York, I Love You. It consists of several short metropolitan dramas, mixed with American and Chinese-American influences. Sober, romantic, sweet-bitter lovestories. As a kind of interactor between the East and the West, I like a detail in the movie, when an old painter got an original inspiration of Chinese kitchen and painting from a Chinese girl herbalist. After having a meal at a Chinese restaurant, he made elaborately ink portraits of her with soyasauce on the napkins in a Chinese restaurant. These paintings were discovered by the girl after he died. What a story……
