Blog – Page 25 – Johan Ronsse

Taste of Okinawa

May 2, 2018 - Posted in cooking

When I was on holiday a few months ago, I took a cooking class at Taste of Okinawa. I finally got around to writing a bit about it.

The dish I made.

The cooking class took place in Naha, Okinawa. Naha is the capital of Okinawa, which is a series of islands in the south of Japan. These islands used to be their own kingdom before becoming what is now known as Okinawa.

The influence of the US — who attacked Okinawa during WWII — can really be felt when you’re there. There are several US military bases on the island and even in the food you’ll sometimes find a US influence with dishes like taco rice (my favorite!) or cans of spam in stores.

Taste of Okinawa is kind of a restaurant/bar that also offers cooking classes. The cooking classes are held in a neat cool space that has 2 big tables and a bar. It is located in a shōtengai, which is a covered arcade full of shops.

Shōtengai (商店街)

When we arrived we found out there were only 2 participants, me and a friend. For me this was great since this meant we would get all the explanation we wanted.

First we went on a tour of the nearby shops. We got explanations about specific ingredients and got to taste some as well.

I loved the fresh market with a wonderful selection of fish. My goal to eat a live shrimp was not fulfilled but the selection there was simply amazing.

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Movie recents (April 2018)

May 1, 2018 - Posted in film

These are the films I’ve seen in cinema in April 2018.

Avengers: Infinity War ★★1/2

After the boringness of Black Panther I wondered for a second what I was doing at another Marvel screening, but I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Pro-tip: if you never saw Age of Ultron and you’re not up to date with the comics maybe it’s a good idea to see this one first.

Game Night ★★1/2

This film has been running in cinemas for a while and it is surprisingly good. I saw this immediately after the lengthy 2h29 Avengers and you would think after seeing such a big movie I’d be disappointed by a small one. Nope! I laughed a lot and the whole film just smoothly flowed from scene to scene leaving me curious and engaged until the end.

Isle of Dogs ★

This is a weird one where I feel the art department should maybe win an Oscar for their work, yet as a film it is no good. It might have been tiredness but I literally almost fell asleep. I do have to state that, except for the Gran Budapest Hotel, I just don’t like Wes Anderson films in general. Quirky, not too much of a story, a big emphasis on style? This one yet again checks a lot of these Anderson boxes.

Wien is ‘t Hof van Commerce? (1/2)

A poor documentary/mockumentary about West-Flemish rap group ‘t Hof van Commerce. I learned absolutely nothing and if the object was to be funny it did not work. To whoever edited this movie: why the constant loopback effect? It almost looks like you learned to use Final Cut the same day you edited the film. On a positive note the music is still a lot of fun and I was reminded of some classic songs.

Movie recents (February + March 2018)

April 5, 2018 - Posted in film - 1 comment

It’s time for another film roundup. These are the films I’ve seen in cinema in February and March 2018.

Phantom Thread ★★★ 1/2

PT Anderson’s best movie in a while. I am definitely going to watch this one again. I’ve seen every Oscar nominee for “Best Picture” besides Darkest hour and this one one should have won in my opinion.

The Square ★★1/2

A Swedish movie. I went into this with low expectations but this was unexpectedly good. In a way it feels a bit like a quality series and not a movie but nonetheless I thought it was very good.

Red Sparrow ★★★ 1/2

Red Sparrow is so much better than the reviews out there say it is. I bought a beer before the show, opened it when the film started and when the credits rolled I realized it was still nearly full. A solid 2h20 of great entertainment.

Call Me by Your Name ★★★

While perhaps a bit too long, this is a great story with some really memorable moments. It has a certain sweetness and peaceness to it, like a summer that never ends.

I, Tonya ★1/2

I did not really enjoy “I, Tonya”. It felt like a TV movie. Maybe the small-scale plot with not much actually happening just wasn’t for me. Kudos to Margot Robbie for both (co-)producing and starring a movie at 27 years old though!

Lady Bird ★★

Expectations are important. For months I’d been hearing that Lady Bird is brilliant. I was expecting a Boyhood-esque coming of age movie. I found it to be enjoyable but I felt very emotionally detached to Lady Bird and her 16-year-old problems. I guess I am not the target audience.

Black Panther ★

For me this was another Marvel snoozefest. It might have been the jetlag as I was coming back from a trip, but I literally fell asleep. For me a film it doesn’t work. It’s as if three stories were forcefully merged into one. I thought maybe after Logan maybe Marvel picked things up again to start their movies with an interesting premise. But this just didn’t work for me.

The★ scoring system is explained in this post.

Multi line regular expressions in Textmate

April 5, 2018 - Posted in development

I am mostly writing this for my own reference.

Because of the Sketch mask trick, when trying to export icons they had a mask in them that I did not want. Basically I had to remove all masks across 75 icons. Since SVGs are just text files, you can do some regex processing to find all <mask> elements:

(?m)\<mask(.*)\/mask\>

The (?m) part is a filter that makes the regex work across multiple lines.

Sources

A visit to Kitchen Town (Kappabashi)

March 24, 2018 - Posted in cooking

On a recent trip to Japan, I combined my newfound obsession with cooking with a not-so-common touristic destination.

Kappabashi or “Kitchen town” is a street lined with cooking-related stores. It is said that if you can’t find it in Kappabashi, you can’t find it anywhere.

You can basically start a restaurant with what you can buy there. No kidding – it’s not just knives and pots and pans – it’s racks, machines, signs, menus and just about everything you can think of.

If you see the big chef, you know you’re in the right spot.

When I came to Kappabashi I first went for a sushi lunch in nearby Asakusa. This touristy neighborhood is probably the first place that many people to go in Tokyo because of Senso-Ji.

Medium fatty tuna, fatty tuna, sweet shrimp. Background – red miso soup.

The place was quite expensive but it was also pretty great in terms of quality. You know you’re in the right spot if you think there is a God right after eating a piece of chūtoro (中とろ) [medium fatty tuna].

Now, on to Kappabashi itself.

Looking through the pictures of my visit, I don’t actually have a lot of good ones, since most of the time there was spent looking through small shops with limited room to move (and thus to photograph).

Japan, land of convenience. Lockers around every station.

I knew I wanted to buy a lot of stuff so I put a big backpack in a coin locker, and went exploring.

Looking around for knives

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On cooking

February 10, 2018 - Posted in cooking

The past year or so I’ve been on a bit of a quest to improve my cooking.

There’s a wealth of info on the internet on how to make almost anything. In my Best of 2017 – YouTube I mentioned 2 cooking channels – not a coincidence!

Lately I’ve been into making curries. First I made this Japanese beef curry:

And then this butter chicken curry:

It might look simple, but there is a lot of work behind this.

The hardest part is nailing the rice and the broth. But then when it turns out well it is quite rewarding.

You do end up with a lot of food though. I’ve resorted to giving out food to friends and family because otherwise I would be eating the same thing for a whole week.

In Antwerp we have this “Chinese street” close to the Central Station which is ideal for sourcing ingredients.

I also found a nice local African shop, where I’ve sourced spices that were otherwise hard to find in my typical supermarket (den “Delhaize”). Best of all it is quite cheap.

Containers and labelling are quite important, especially for spices. I’ve bought so many plastic boxes to store things but I still feel like I run out of containers often.

This shows some of the stuff I got today. The rice paper is meant to make some spring rolls. The nori sheets are meant for an experiment to make some ramen. The celery and the spring onions are for the ramen as well.

It might sound stupid but every time you try something new, you cross a new boundary in skill levels. First a piece of ginger is this semi-exotic object and 6 months later you’re like – how can you not have a piece of ginger on hand at all times?

My latest experiment is this 1,5kg of beef meat I just bought in a local butcher shop (€8). In the supermarket I’d probably pay 4 euros for the best part of this which I can just cut off now. Then I have some remainders and I can make a broth from the bones.

Awesome.

January Films (4)

January 31, 2018 - Posted in film

As my last film of January I saw The Shape of Water. This is a fantastic movie that is just pure cinema. Some call it a fairytale, some talk about it being a metaphor for the “increasing modern-day non-acceptance of people outside the norm”.

Honestly, what I see is Guillermo Del Toro doing what he did in Pan’s Labyrinth, but better. The Shape of Water fuses the supernatural with a realistic environment and a great story. It passed the six laugh test easily and the small cinema room was often filled with oohs and ahs. I had a great time watching this. (★★★)

My top for January:

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ★★★
The Florida Project ★★★1/2
The Shape of Water ★★★

January films (3)

January 27, 2018 - Posted in film

I was in a screening of The Post. The average age in the room must’ve been higher than 50… probably the people who were alive when all of this happened.

This film has gotten some good reviews but it didn’t really do it for me. I didn’t connect with the film at all. There was good imagery and a great performance from Meryl Streep but ultimately it all felt a little flat and overproduced. (★1/2.)

Edit: in Kermode’s podcast, they mentioned the “Spielberg light”; this must’ve been the bloomy cinematic effect that bothered me.

January Films (2)

January 24, 2018 - Posted in film - 1 comment

Maybe it’s because I am now a recent convert to the Church, or maybe it’s because I am looking for excuses to get my steps per day up, but I’ve been going to the cinema so often, it’s a bit crazy.

Just today, I cancelled my Netflix account in a vow to be more picky in what “content I choose to consume”. It’s not that Netflix is bad. I honestly enjoyed a lot of stuff that is on Netflix last year — just look at this list — but Netflix also makes it way too easy to keep watching trashy shows with zero value.

But let’s move on to what I really wanted to write about, my recent moviegoing.

Yesterday I saw The Florida Project (★★★1/2). I was impressed by the story constantly wavering from following 6-year old Mooney on her adventures to following her mother’s. I don’t want to spoil anything, if you like great photography I would just see this film without knowing too much about it.

A week ago I saw Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (★1/2). This is just a fun well-made comedy/feelgood movie, nothing more, nothing less. I wouldn’t specifically go to the cinemas for this one, but this is actually a decent movie.

Maybe it is also time to explain the star rating system I use, because it can confuse some people.

★★★★★	This is reserved for only a handful of movies in the world. For a film to receive five stars is very rare. Movies that get five stars have some kind of historic value in filmmaking. They might change filmmaking itself.
★★★★	This is reserved for just one movie a year, two would make a very good movie year. This is a must-see.
★★★	This is a good movie, I heartily recommend it.
★★	This is a good movie, I can recommend it, but it has some downsides
★	This is a mediocre movie, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it does have some aspect that makes it interesting, or something to watch, particularly if you are interested in that one aspect
1/2 stars	Same as above but you’d have to be super passionate about that one aspect

January Films

January 13, 2018 - Posted in film

A few days I subscribed to the Kermode podcast. I listened to one very long episode and I already love it.

They were talking about Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (★★★), and even interviewed the director Martin McDonagh. Last night I saw this film and I must say it was very, very good.

It even surpassed Molly’s Game (another recent opener) (★★) if I would have to make a ranking. This film is Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut. You might know Aaron Sorkin as the screenwriter behind various fantastic works like The Newsroom, A Few Good Men and The Social Network.

I’ve also seen All The Money in the World (★★), the latest Ridley Scott film. You might have heard about a frantic reshoot after it was revealed what Kevin Spacey had done; the reshoot seemingly didn’t affect this film at all. I thought the performances were strong and this movie had me entertained throughout.