Four Seasons Chinese Restaurant

Just a short post - in London my friend and I went to a Chinese restaurant called the Four Seasons to have the Cantonese-style duck, as recommended by a friend who knows his stuff! And boy, did he know what he was talking about.

YUM.

That was some great duck right there. Intensely flavorful, with deliciously crisp skin and fat that just melted in your mouth... *sighs contentedly*

I also really liked the metal decorations they had on display around the restaurant, and took a few photos.From the shape and the small bar holding the two pieces together, I think that these might belong on double doors, with the small bar being the bolt to hold the doors shut. So neat!

More on my short trip to London soon!

The Economist, March 7th - 13th 2015

From economist.com.

Today I did something that I admittedly do not do as often as I should: I read the Economist cover-to-cover.

Reading about politics was as depressing as always (gotta love potential nuclear conflicts), but there were some other, very interesting posts that I would like to share here.

The first is the article Silicon Valley gets a taste for food, which is all about creating realistic "fake" meat and dairy products out of plants. It's an extremely fascinating article, and definitely worth the read! Personally, I really want a taste of that burger.
"For meat, the aim is to recreate its key components—muscle, connective and fat tissue—using suitable plant materials. [Impossible Foods'] first product, a hamburger patty, already looks and cooks like meat, and will taste as good or better by the time it reaches the shops, Dr Brown promises. (...) The company has also spent a lot of time working out what gives meat its unique flavour. According to Dr Brown, the secret to a burger’s taste is haem, a compound found in all living cells, including plants. It is especially abundant in haemoglobin in blood, and in muscle tissues as myoglobin. It also gives a burger its red colour. During the cooking process haem acts as a catalyst that helps transform the amino acids, vitamins and sugars in muscle tissue into numerous volatile and flavourful molecules, he explains. To create the meaty flavour in its burger patties, the company uses a heme protein equivalent to one found in the roots of legumes." (Text from economist.com)


Then, there's the short article Particulates matter, which briefly addresses an amazing presentation by Chai Jing that went viral. Already the video has been removed and hidden - censorship at work, one assumes - but I found the video with English subtitles, and HIGHLY recommend it. I started watching thinking that I'd get bored within five minutes and skim over the rest, but no. I was captivated, watching the entire 1 hour, 44 minute long video with mounting incredulity and disbelief. It's... frightening, to be honest, and amazingly presented by Chai Jing. Please take the time to watch it.

Lastly, I found to my surprise an article on fashion - to be precise, one concerning the late Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. A recently published book is mentioned, and I've already added it to my shopping cart on amazon - Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. It sounds excellent.
However, of particular interest in the article was the mention of an exhibition to take place in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, starting this Saturday. A retrospective of Alexander McQueen's creative work up till his suicide in 2010, it's an exhibition I don't intend to miss - since I have the great fortune of being in London right in time for it! (Unfortunately, it says on the website that sketching is not allowed within the exhibit. Phooey.)

Speaking of my trip to London, however, I'll be there for just under a week, and already have quite a few things planned! I'm going with my best friend, and she has a very good camera, so you can look forward to a few photos posted either during or after the trip - and don't worry, I won't fill the blog with tourist photos (those can go on facebook, thank you very much), but some more artistic shots might find their way onto this blog. Some sketches, hopefully, too, but those will have to wait till I'm back in Germany and can scan them in!

That's most of what I did today - what about you?

Chinese New Year

I live in Tübingen, a rather international German city despite its relatively small size, and there are a number of Chinese families living in our area. With my mother’s help, these families got together and organized a New Year celebration on the 21^st of February that we were all invited to attend!

At midday on Saturday we made our way over to the gathering place to find it overrun with adorable, cheery-faced Chinese kids – I don’t think a single one of them was over the age of eight! So sweet.
The parents were either hanging up decorations (like this, for example) or preparing dough and fillings for dumplings, which would then be prepared by everyone together – guests included!

Just before we started making dumplings, I realized I hadn’t thought to bring a camera and instead drew this with the only pen I could find. There were a lot more tables and a lot more people than pictured here!

Then people started gathering around the tables with mounds of dough and minced meat or carrot fillings; chopping, rolling and wrapping, and I joined some of my siblings at a table with some Chinese ladies. It was my first time wrapping dumplings, and a lady I already knew from one of Mom’s English groups, Dan (yes, that’s her real name), showed me the trick to wrapping Chinese dumplings. I tried to draw the process, but was unsure how to properly show the trick to folding over the dough. You can check out a blog post with many excellent photos here!

One of the Chinese ladies liked it so much that she took a photo. It’s so poorly drawn, though!

There were so many dumplings to be wrapped that finished and cooked (boiled) dumplings were being brought out even as we wrapped more – but oh, were they good! The meat filling had celery in it, which I typically don’t like but enjoyed in the dumpling, and the carrot filling was equally delicious. To dip we had what I believe was a soy sauce and vinegar dip, with garlic added for a bit of extra zing. There were side dishes of radish salad and cold rice noodles.

In Korea, they say that wrapping beautiful dumplings for the New Year means that you’ll have beautiful daughters; I don’t know if it applies to Chinese dumplings wrapped shortly after the New Year, but Anastasia and my dumplings were very beautiful indeed! Interestingly, Chinese dumplings supposedly symbolize wealth because their shape is similar to that of a Chinese sycee – a gold or silver ingot currency used in China until the 20^th century.

After lunch we were in for a little show – some members of a nearby Wu Shu academy came by to do an authentic dragon dance and various fight sequences with bare hands (and lots of kicks) or a variety of bladed weapons (with very flexible metal blades). The teacher that accompanied the (clearly not Chinese) students was Master Zhuo Haojun, who is a highly qualified Wu Shu trainer. Having not only won the Wu Shu World Championships (back in 1994), he has worked as a professional stuntman in Kung Fu movies (doubling even for such well-known names as Jet Li) and is the trainer of the German national team. We didn’t know all that in advance, but as soon as we first saw him move it was clear that he was extremely competent, and we would have loved to see more! I think his sister, who is equally well-qualified and founded the academy in Tübingen, was also there, but she mainly remained in the background, letting her brother take the spotlight. 

That’s the two of them there!

I think Dominic and I are both tempted to join a course at their academy – I particularly liked the loud slaps and stamps, especially when they’d do a high kick, slapping their foot loudly as it sped over their head, then bring it down with a loud stamp. It made for a very powerful rhythm.

That was my experience at the Chinese New Year celebration! 2015 is the year of the goat – or the sheep, or ram, depending on region or preference. The Chinese word yáng refers to both goats and sheep, and apparently the zodiacal yáng is more likely to be thought of as a goat in the south and a sheep in the north in China. 

The Year of the Sheep is believed to be a year of promise and prosperity, and the Sheep reflects the Earth and Yin: A passive or female principle, covert and shaded, soft and yielding. This year is considered a good one for family and creativity. Sounds perfect to me!