Let's Roll!

Though I was in Vietnam for work, I was lucky enough to visit Ha Long Bay for my first weekend. How could I be so close to one of the newly announced natural world wonders and not see it?

While there are plenty of pictures of the actual scenery coming soon, I first wanted to share a delicious recipe for fresh spring rolls. We got to assemble and enjoy these on the roof deck of our boat, while soaking in the incredible sunset sweeping over the bay. It was a surreal experience and these tasty rolls made it all the better!

FRESH SPRING ROLLS

The original recipe has been adapted for vegetarian sensibilities :-) I haven't specified exact measurements since the original recipe is all in grams, but exact measurements aren't particularly needed here!

Ingredients:
Spring Rolls
- Cooked rice vermicelli noodles
- Omelette, sliced into thin ribbons
- Fresh mint and coriander, leaves only
- Fresh ginger, thinly sliced
- Fresh lettuce, torn
- Toasted sesame seeds
- Thinly sliced chili pepper (optional)
- Rice paper

1. Place an individual sheet of rice paper onto a plate and lightly brush the entire surface with water (only one side of the sheet)
2. Spread a thin layer of noodles across the diameter of the rice paper. Repeat with the omelette ribbons.
3. Layer the torn lettuce and herbs on top. Sprinkle with the ginger, sesame seeds and, if you like, sliced chili.
4. Carefully wrap one end of the rice paper around the fillings, and then slowly roll towards the open end of the rice paper. You can leave the ends open or tuck them in like a burrito.

Dipping Sauce
- Water
- Sugar, to taste
- Garlic, minced
- Lemon juice, to taste
- Minced mint and coriander
- Rice vinegar, to taste
- Sesame oil

1. Combine the minced garlic, herbs, lemon juice, dash of rice vinegar and sugar in a small dish, and add sesame oil and water to taste. This was adapted from using fish sauce - if you prefer fish sauce, the ratio is 1 part fish sauce to 5 parts water.

Some variations I'm dying to try include using curried tofu instead of egg and making a spicy peanut dipping sauce. To me, the fresh herbs and ginger are key, but really the possibilities are endless!

Postcard from Vietnam

Cat on a Hot Temple Roof

Last Saturday I returned from a three week trip (2 parts business, 1 part holiday) to Southeast Asia. I was a little worse for wear after the twenty hour flight but feeling very happy after a week with my parents in Bangkok. It also helped that Pem was waiting to greet me at Dulles arrivals. Now more than a week later, I've finally recovered from jet lag so it's back to the blog for me (photo editing and blogging will always triumph over unpacking and doing laundry)! 

I've got a whole bunch of pictures to post, from Vietnam especially. What a host of wonderful, special and occasionally baffling experiences even two weeks will bring you there! But before I get into all that, I have something delicious to share first. Every traveler knows that you get to the heart of a place through its food!

Frames

I recently came across these magnetic photo frames from CB2. What a simple but great idea. They're a nice way to add a little class and organization for all those photos you have stuck to the refrigerator. 

You Are What You Pin

Have you guys gotten swept up in the Pinterest trend yet? It took me a few weeks after initially joining, but now I'm hooked! It happens a little like this.

It's such a simple way to save, organize and share inspiring images you come across during your daily web surfing. Pinning also allows you to create a virtual wishlist, especially of things that you may only dream about purchasing.

Pinterest is such a fabulous way to see what others are inspired by. Pinners continue to share things that truly do interest them, rather than use it as a way to share things they have negative feelings about. I also feel like you can sense a fair amount of person's personality and taste in the images they pin, which naturally gets my gears going. Especially for the pinners I follow that I don't know or don't know very well, it's a creative space to get to know them better and vice versa.

However, a word of caution to the pin-happy, despite recent changes to their terms of service, Pinners are still responsible for the content they pin. That means, if you pin a copyrighted image without permission, you are liable, not Pinterest.

I mostly follow other Pinners rather than pin myself, but if you're curious, you're welcome to follow my Pinterest here.

Happy (responsible) Pinning!

A Little Creative License...

Spring is officially here, which means it's time for me to come out of hibernation! It's been unusually busy for me at work lately hence the hiatus from blogging, but it definitely feels good to be back at Dolma :)

For my first post after nearly a month (!), I wanted to write about something I've been thinking a lot about lately - the value of creative license within the increasingly fact-based, news oriented production and consumption of information in our society.

The constant accessibility of 24-hr. cable news, the sheer amount of information available about nearly everyone and everything on the planet that is literally at our fingertips... it's truly awe-some and certainly makes for a more informed society but I wonder, does this make us any more intellectually curious, thoughtful and understanding of where we're positioned in relation to the things happening around us?

In some ways, certainly. Yet I sense that so much in our society now hinges upon whether something is true or not. Take the recent debate about Mike Daisey's "The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs". Despite the NPR snafu, Daisey has always presented his work as theatre. When we saw him at Woolly Mammoth last year, he was upfront about this - he said, "I am a storyteller". But now that certain details in his story have been presented as bungled or inconsistent, we're apt to think that the story he has to tell is no longer valid. Should that detract for his overarching message about how our (largely) ignorant consumerism fuels unsafe working conditions and the suffering of people halfway around the world?

When anyone tells you a story, you expect some embellishments. Storytellers want to impress upon the listener the significance of a story and elicit an emotional response to what they're sharing. If we took their story at face value, then fact-checked the hell out of it, could we be missing the point entirely of why they wanted to share their story in the first place? We're so keen on letting the facts speak for themselves, when sometimes we should probably be listening more closely to our emotional reactions instead.

I raise this because I think Daisey's work walks the same thin line that photography does. Photography can be presented as art, and photos can also be presented as fact. From photojournalism to the glossy magazine spreads of Photoshopped models to the sensationalist tabloid covers in the grocery checkout lane, the images we see daily run across the true-false spectrum. My curiosity doesn't necessarily lie in whether these images are real and true, but rather what sort of story are they telling and what meaning do we extract from them?