Marijke's blog

Nuts with honey and olive oil in Istanbul, a photo by Curious Food Lover on Flickr.

Nuts with honey and olive oil in Istanbul

I am addicted to researching, I love to scout for unknown (to me) information – whether it’s to write the “did you know” sections of the travel guides or as in this example to solve technical challenges. The fun thing is that with the Internet at my finger tips the premise is quite simple; every answer is already available – the key is to ask the right question. Love it! In a few days I’m able to share the first results of the app – completely based upon online education.

The ideas around the Blazer Guides – culinary travel tips for curious food lovers – are getting more and more shape. One of the essential starting points is that the guides are indeed ebook, however, published in PDF format, because of the formatting possibilities. My fear was, though, that I would disqualify all e-reader users. The good news is that I can send the pdf files straight to the kindle devices. Yay! Details will follow, obviously, just wanted to share the good news for now.

I really wish I could copy and paste straight away pictures into this weblog. Yes, because I am too lazy (or pragmatic, or efficient) to save a file to disk, find the file and insert it again. Bleg. But, ok, since there is no other way to do it, I just have to get fast and not too furious about it.

charlotte al fresco



Making the culinary city guides feels like on big creative adventure, and since the scope is so well defined (for once) – 15 specialties, 30 addresses -, it has become very attractive to be fully responsible for the end product in all its different forms; facts and photos in as ebook, pdf file and flash based app, supported by a webshop and available through other official sales channels. It’s fun to working on collecting inspiring and surprising content on one hand, and producing “things that work” on the other. Feels like an optimal training of both sides of my brain.

At times I feel that my work should only consist of the “real thing” – creating, collecting and processing great culinary travel tips. And all other things, ranging from promoting my products, maintain contact with relations to keeping track of my expenses feel like useless distractions, keeping me from being productive where it matters.

The thing is, though, that exactly these things – making sure that the products get sold and making sure that there is a good balance between money coming in and going out (= profit balance) make a “hobby” into an enterprise.

Of course it is important to offer the most wonderful product, but if in the long run there is no economical justification, then I cannot say that I run a company, then I am just offering a non-profit service to the world. Which in return means that I should look for another way to take care of the bills at home, having to look for a proper job, having less time to spend on creating great content, etc.

So, I am glad that I kind of start to accept the fact that there are many – equally important – aspects to enterpreneurship, not being able to exist without one and other.

Blijken toch overwegend snacks te zijn, dus voor de maaltijden kunnen mensen kijken naar typisch hollandse ingredienten – streek/seizoensproducten

Dear fellow Curious Food Lovers,

August is in the air. It’s the season of summer in Europe, the time of an abundance of fresh vegetables and  fruit.

Talking of fruit. A little while ago I started writing this frequent inspiration update and I wanted to focus on the amazing ways some fruits display their pips, in order to seduce birds to help with their reproduction.  Then something funny happened, because while writing about the reproduction techniques of fruits, I could not help myself but to start with the story of the flowers and the bees.  Because that’s the story at least I grew up with when asking where babies came from, so to me this theory had the closest association to reproduction.

That was where the confusion started. I thought that the subject of reproduction was quite straightforward, comparable to the human/mammal situation: egg + seed + intercourse = offspring  (when all goes well).  So, pollen + pistil + bee = offspring. Right?

When I came to think of it, however,  the process supported by the bees of making sure that a flower transforms into fruit, seemed like only the beginning. True reproduction appeared to start when the seeds formed within the fruits are spread in order to grow new plants.

So my question is, when you compare the reproductive situation of fruit  to the human reproduction: is the human baby than analogous to a single piece of fruit or to a whole new plant?

Perhaps the answer can be found in one of the many amazing botanical gardens around the world. If you’d like to dig deeper into the subject of how our fruit – and other plants – grows , you may want to visit one of the these  great botanical gardens. These definitely qualify as interesting culinary activities, thanks to their background information about the reproductive systems of all thinkable kinds of plants. And not just that, officially botanical gardens also qualify as museums, based upon their facilities of presenting collections (of plants in this case) “for the purpose of study, education and enjoyment” (source http://icom.museum/hist_def_eng.html).

So lets put the botanical gardens in the Curious Food Lovers fact finding spotlights,

10 X  “Did you know that…”:

1.       there are over 1800 botanical gardens in more than 150 countries.

2.       around the world, botanic gardens attract about 150.000.000 visitors per year.

3.       botanic gardens are called that way because they display the botanic names of the plants – the formal scientific name conform the ‘International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN).

4.        ”scientific” gardens are dating back to antiquity and were found in ancient Egypt, Assyria, Mexico and China and were used in particular for the study of plants of economic, medicinal or sheer exotic value.

5.       the origin of modern botanical gardens can be traced to European medieval medicinal gardens known as physic gardens, the first of these being founded during the Italian Renaissance in the 16th century.

6.       through the 17^th century idea of a botanical garden changed to include presentations of the beautiful, strange, new and sometimes economically important plants being brought back from travels to the European colonies and other distant lands.

7.       during the late 18th century economic botany became a new scientific approach: the study of relationships between plants and people, exploring the ways humans use plants for food, shelter, medicines, textiles, and much more.

8.       in many cases botanical gardens are run by universities or other scientific organisations, in order to documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display and education.

9.       considering the large numbers of visitors during recent times, many gardens are grabbing the opportunity at the start of the 21^st century to inform the general public about numerous environmental issues, such as biodiversity, sustainability and plant conservation.

10.   you could say that a botanical garden is the vegetation-variety of the zoo.

Now, do you feel like putting on your gastronomy glasses and have a look around at one of the many botanical gardens of the world, looking for parts of reproduction story behind your food?  To help you get started, I made a shortlist of a few of the largest and oldest gardens in the world. Short overviews with background information can be found at the detailed overview of each activity.

Royal Botanic Garden of Trinidad & Tobago
Fruit & Spice Park of Florida (United States)
Hortus Botanicus Leiden (the Netherlands)
Jardin des Plantes – Paris (France)
Komarov Botanical Institute – st Petersburg (Russian Federation)
Kew Gardens – London (United Kingdom)
National Botanic Garden of Belgium
Oxford Botanic Gardens (United Kingdom)
Qinling Mountains National Botanical Garden (China)
Royal Botanic Garden of Sydney (Australia)
Royal Botanic Garden of Ontario (Canada)
Royal Botanic Gardens of Melbourne (Australia)
The New York Botanical Garden (United States)

Of course, if you have any stories to share about your visits to one of the many botanical gardens or other the other great culinary activities of the world, I’d love know!

For now, happy exploring,

Marijke

Some Delicate Food Model : Art, Design.
I am a real sucker for items in surreal proportions: very small scale models and their opposite; reproductions of every day items on of gigantic format.

A little while ago I blogged about a French girl making beautiful small scale delicacies, and today I stumbled upon a link to this blog (thanks to @Culijoy). Great thing about this photo-supported article is that you get an idea how the tiny food models are made. Amazing!

Since today it is possible to add pictures to activities. Yey! So I am kind of practicing with adding pictures to the Chocolate Museum in Barcelona, with the use of the amazing Flickr community creative commons collection.

In the caption with the pictures on the site, I can only add short texts, so here you find the full reference to the pictures I have used:

MX chocolate museum in El Borne by Oh-Barcelona.com, on Flickr

Chocolate Museum by marcoPapale.com, on Flick

Barcelona Chocolate Museum by marcoPapale.com, on Flickr

Barcelona Chocolate Museum by marcoPapale.com, on Flickr - "Ben Hur almost melting away"