The Star Online: Lifestyle: Parenting
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Parenting |
- Fantastical plates of food art
- Immersed in the magic of fairytales
- Duran Duran's John Taylor talks about his family
| Fantastical plates of food art Posted: One mother's knack for making meal times fun for her kids has propelled her into super-stardom. SNOW White has grapes for sleeves, Cinderella is all decked out in a nori gown and the Little Mermaid, well, has scrambled eggs for hair. As far as Disney princesses go, mother-of-two Samantha Lee has got it all figured out. The Selangor-based homemaker is nothing short of a miracle mum – everyday, she creates fantastical plates of food art for her daughters, using simple ingredients easily found at the local supermarket aisles. Her love for telling stories with bits of asparagus-turned-grass, or cherry tomatoes for balloons, has garnered a huge fan base on photo and video sharing site Instagram. Lee currently has over 270,000 followers from around the world, and her fans continue to grow by the minute. On average, Lee now receives over 20,000 likes on each of her posts, most of which almost always appear on the photo-sharing social network's Popular Page.  In fact, the 37-year-old is now a global sensation. News of her talent has made it to Huffington Post, NBC News' TODAY Moms and The Daily Mail in Britain. Lee remembers getting goosebumps when she watched celebrity Khloe Kardashian and her mum discussing her food art on the Kris Jenner Show in New York. "I couldn't believe it. It was the first time seeing my pictures on TV. All this happened right after TODAY Moms contacted me for an e-mail interview. Within a week, I was all over the international media," she says, when Star2 caught up with her for brunch (food from a restaurant, unfortunately). Because of the time difference, Lee has been staving off sleep till 3am every night to respond to enquiries from the international media, which has so far included the French, Chinese, Japanese and Austrian dailies.  She has since appeared on-screen (via Skype) with the Good Day Sacramento morning show in California, where she shared a colourful how-to for a Snow White-themed toast topped with fresh fruits, cream cheese and a layer of Nutella. While all this happened just a month ago, Lee's popularity has been on a steady growth since the start of the year, when her name came up tops in BuzzFeed's shortlist of "30 Delightful Instagram Accounts That Will Bring Joy Into Your Life". "I was really puzzled when I started getting at least 20 new Instagram followers by the second. I had a feeling that something big was happening, but I didn't know what," recalls Lee, who later heard the news from one of her followers. Within a week, @leesamantha was dealing with 50,000 new followers. Even supermodel and celebrity TV host Tyra Banks herself had been wowed by the cute food art, having reposted Lee's makes twice on her personal Instagram account – one of an omelette-haired Nicki Minaj and another of Psy the onigiri (rice ball), dancing amidst a pool of vegetables.  Early last year, when Star2 first met Lee over a story on the Japanese-inspired character bento (or charaben), the self-taught cook shared that her foray with food art began as an attempt to make meal times fun for her eldest daughter, six-year-old Elizabeth Goh. Boring plates of broccoli started becoming lush trees in a forest and hardboiled eggs, tiny Totoro forest spirits. The experiment soon turned into a passion and Lee started sharing daily posts of her whimsical work about two years ago on the then newly-launched Instagram. "People have commented that I get to 'play' with my food because I'm a housewife and that I must have a lot of time on my hands. That's not true at all. Staying at home with the kids is one of the toughest jobs a woman can have," explains Lee, who regards her food art-designing moments as a welcome break from the daily grind. Her creations, elaborate as they are, takes up a total of one and a half hours, which is essentially about the same amount of time it takes to cook a meal. The savoury dinner spread you see on her Instagram though, is usually only a portion of the food she prepares for the family – Lee makes a similar plate, only smaller, for her youngest, Evana Goh, four; the rest is served on a plain platter to be shared with her husband, Desmond Goh, 39, who heads a mechanical and engineering company. Lee assures that her food tastes as good as it looks. "Back when I first started, the food would get all cold by the time I put on the finishing touches. Now I plan all my designs in advance and just focus on the cooking." Her biggest challenge though, lies in creating something new every day.  Samantha Lee during the Skype interview session with the Good Day Sacramento morning show in California. Needless to say, Lee's inspirations come from her two daughters, whom she regards as her biggest fans. Her creative process includes sketching out designs on paper (currently, a bright blue notebook), and running through a mental directory of useful (and tasty) ingredients that resemble the shape or colours of the design. Unlike most charaben-making mothers, Lee seems to enjoy the challenge of using a limited number of tools– in her kitchen drawer, what you'd probably find is a few sharp knives, a jar of toothpicks and her absolute favourite: a good pair of scissors (Lee has developed a knack for cutting seaweed slices freehand). Lee is also creative when it comes to repurposing furniture – many may not know this, but she takes pride in styling her phone-only snapshots on a "fake" table, which consists of a piece of wooden shelf from her closet.  Samantha Lee's whimsical inspirations come from her two daughters, Elizabeth, six (left) and Evana, four, whom she regards as her biggest fans. The crafty mother has since been signed on as one of the brand personalities of HTC Malaysia for its HTC One smartphone. Last month, Lee was invited to share her no-frills cooking skills at a workshop in Singapore, in partnership with Naturel cooking oil, and again on ntv7's Bella TV show as a brand personality for Tefal cookware. Lee wasn't at all terrified at the prospect of facing a live audience, despite having little experience. "During the Bella show, I was only supposed to share two creations but because I finished so quickly, I had to come up with another one on-the-spot. I really enjoyed the challenge. "Workshops are a lot of fun and I hope to do more of them in the future." With hopes to publish a cookbook on the theme soon, Lee has vowed to stay grounded, despite having becoming a celebrity of sorts. "I have so much to be thankful for. I still read and reply all of the comments I get on Instagram. My heart still jumps for joy whenever I get a new 'like'. It never gets old!" Apart from her ingenuity with food, Lee's rise to fame perhaps boils down to her willingness to share, be it a newly-discovered cooking technique or a fresh take on an old ingredient. "I'm always happy to inspire other mums out there to create cute food art for their kids. It doesn't have to be done every day; just try it once in a while. "You may fail the first time around but keep going. That's how I got my own kids to be adventurous with food." |
| Immersed in the magic of fairytales Posted: Children love fairytales, and use them to make sense of the world. In fact, teaching them stories is more important than spelling and punctuation. IF YOU want your children to be intelligent," Albert Einstein once remarked, "read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales." It is a sentiment with which author Philip Pullman heartily agrees. Which is as well, because his latest bestseller is a highly acclaimed and high-voltage retelling of 50 Grimm brothers fairytales. "Fairy stories," Pullman says, sitting on the sofa in his farmhouse in Oxfordshire, South-East England, "loosen the chains of the imagination. They give you things to think with – images to think with – and the sense that all kinds of things are possible. While at the same time, being ridiculous or terrifying or consolatory. Or something else altogether, as well." Not everyone of a scientific bent would, he concedes, concur. The British scientist Richard Dawkins, for one, has said he is not at all sure of the effect on children of "bringing them up to believe in spells and wizards and magic wands and things turning into other things". It is all "very unscientific", Dawkins frets.  Make-believe magic: Fairytales help children make sense of the world. — Filepic "Dawkins is wrong to be anxious," he says. "Frogs don't really turn into princes. That's not what's really happening. It's 'Let's pretend'; 'What if'; that kind of thing. It's completely harmless. On the contrary, it's helpful and encouraging to the imagination." We are talking, a couple of weeks before the release of the paperback edition of the author's Grimm Tales For Young And Old, about fairy stories, and wondering just what it is about them that explains their enduring appeal for the young and the not-so-young. Later, the talk turns to stories in general, and why the reading and the telling of them is so extraordinarily important for children and their families. But first, fairytales. What makes them so special? Whatever Dawkins may fear, it is not the magic, the supernatural. "That's helpful in the technical sense, in that it helps you get things done quickly and without explanation," Pullman says. "But it's not actually necessary. Some of the best fairytales in this book, like The Robber Bridegroom, have no magic at all. It's simply about getting on with the story: 'Why is this frog talking?' 'Because he's really a prince.' 'Ah, I see, it's magic. OK then, on with the story.'" And in a fairytale, getting on with the story is all. The modern novel, for adults or for children, attempts a degree of "psychological depth," says Pullman. The fairytale isn't in the business of psychological depth, it's in the business of extraordinary event following extraordinary event. Anything else would just get in the way." There are, then, notes Pullman, very few fairytales – very few folk stories of any kind – in which characters' feelings are explored in any meaningful sense: "In fact they might as well not have feelings. They might just as well not have thoughts. They just ... do things."  Story time: Professional storyteller Judy Shaik takes her audience on an enchanted journey through her storytelling. — Filepic Psychology, motivation, rounded character: those aren't all that fairytales leave out. They also, more often than not, neglect to give you anything you might generally expect in the way of background, context or explanation. "'Once upon a time there was a farmer who had three sons,'" begins Pullman. "There you go: you're off. That's all you need. You don't go into the backstory. You don't say where this was because it doesn't matter where it was. You don't say what the sons were called, because that doesn't matter either: the eldest son, the middle son, the youngest son." All of which means you can't and – despite countless efforts to interpret them by everyone from Freudians to feminists – shouldn't try to read a fairytale "in the way you read Middlemarch or Proust or whoever. A fairytale isn't a text in the literary sense. It's not made out of words so carefully chosen that no other word would do. It's made out of events." Is that what appeals to children? The sheer, uncomplicated story-ness of the fairytale, its headlong rush to an ending, its complete absence of diversion, explanation or even emotion, its unquestioning cardboard cutout characters, their ever-astonishing deeds? In part, certainly, Pullman says. But the real attraction of the fairytale for children lies elsewhere, he believes. "I think it's to do with justice," he says. "Children have a profound and unshakeable belief that things have got to be fair. They like stories in which the good people are rewarded, and the bad punished. And that's a characteristic certainly of the Grimm tales, and of many other folk tales too." There is other stuff children love about them too, of course: "They like the golden hair coming down from the tower, they like the little girl being chased by the wolf, all of that. But if Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wolf and that was the end of the story, they wouldn't like it. These stories have to take place in a moral universe that we recognise as being right and true and just." It doesn't matter, though, that the punishments meted out to the bad people can be rather harsh. People have their heads chopped off or their eyes pecked out. "All that's perfectly OK," says Pullman. "Children know these things aren't true in a literal sense, but true in a different sort of sense. Really, they're just funny: 'Ooh, bet that hurt. Serve them right!'" Something else about fairytales: if they are not literary texts – and the more literary fairytales, those of Hans Christian Andersen or Oscar Wilde, Pullman "doesn't care for at all" – that's also because they are transcriptions of words that were originally spoken. Fairytales are oral; they beg to be told. There is no reason why parents as well as teachers shouldn't have a few stories tucked away in their head, Pullman reckons. Indeed it would be a very good thing. "It used to be grandmothers," he says. "It was granny who had the stories. But you can build up your stock, your treasury, by looking at books. This one, or Katharine Briggs's British Folk Tales And Legends – marvellous, just irreplaceable." You need to "get a little story in your head, and get it there well enough to tell it without making any big mistakes. Rehearse it. That's what I used to do, out walking the dog. Then tell it. Doesn't matter if it's to a child or a grandchild [Pullman has four, aged from two to 11], to children at a party, or to children in the back of the car." Once a story is secure in your head, you can maybe start to embroider it. "That way, you find out what you're good at," says Pullman. "It might be, for example, that you're very good at being funny, in which case your audiences will love you and beg you to carry on. I could never really do funny things. I did exciting things and dangerous things, but not funny things. But the way you learn that is by doing it." Important as storytelling should be, though, it should not replace the bedtime book, Pullman believes. "The book is just so important," he says. "An important thing, a valuable thing. Just the sharing time, with the child and the book; and letting the book absorb the attention of the child, getting a bit scuffed, the pages being a bit ripped, scribbled on perhaps." When you read a storybook to a child: "Don't skip the pictures. I've seen some parents race through a book, just reading the words, one eye on their watch. The way to do it is to talk about the pictures as well – ask questions." But why exactly are the storybook, and the story, so crucially important? Pullman is as eloquent and as fervent as you might hope on this. "I'm convinced," he says, "that these –these and nursery rhymes – are the foundations of all subsequent language skills. "These are the fundamental things, the real basics. Our politicians talk about 'the basics' all the time, but what they mean are things that you can correct at the last minute on your word processor: spelling, punctuation, that kind of thing. But the most basic thing of all is your attitude to language. "If your attitude to language has been generated by a parent who enjoys it with you, who sits you on their lap and reads and tells stories and sings songs with you and talks about the story and asks you questions and answers your questions, then you will grow up with a basic sense that language is fun. Language is for talking and sharing things and enjoying rhymes and songs and riddles and things like that." So, read stories to your children, and tell them too, is Pullman's plea. In the end, he says: "It's the sense of sharing something. The sense of sharing a wonder. These are wonder tales. And if you don't get all straight and anxious about them, if you let the wonder just flower and take root and enrich the child's imagination and yours, you'll be the better for it. And there we are." – Guardian News & Media |
| Duran Duran's John Taylor talks about his family Posted: The bass guitarist and co-founder of 1980s pop rock band talks about his mum and dad, and the demands of a blended family. BEING an only child was both blissful and frustrating. I still don't share my toys very well. Growing up in a triangle with two loving parents was a tremendous privilege, but I didn't develop that tough skin you get from having to fight for attention. There were a lot of rude awakenings. On my first day at school, they parked the craziest kids next to me – I was stunned. My father was of a generation whose wartime experiences left them with untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. He didn't talk about it until he was in his 80s, but it was always present. He was a prisoner of war for three years. Then, at the end of the war, he was put on a 500-mile forced march. Hundreds died. Finally, they ran into the advancing allies and it was over. He was 25. All he would say was that he had it easy compared to Uncle George, who was a prisoner in Japan. Dad was tightly buckled up, not expressive with his feelings, but he was such a sweet guy. He showed love by making himself useful. He could line curtains, put up shelves – he loved a project. As a child, interests often come out of the desire to be close to a parent, and we spent hours bonding over Airfix kits. When I got my first electric guitar, I wasn't happy with the look of it, so he found me some ermine white (paint), left over from his second beloved Ford Cortina, and helped me spray it. Mum was a music fan. There was never a sense it was something we could do – no instruments or lessons – but she loved to put the radio on and sing along. After my parents died, I found a beautiful little notebook from the late 40s in which she had painstakingly handwritten the words to about 50 popular songs. My parents grew up on the same working-class Birmingham street. Their generation didn't have today's high expectations of relationships and life. Dad knew my mum's brothers and they planned it together. They were a good match. They wanted work, someone to share their life with, their own home and a child. They got that and they were extraordinarily grateful. Dad adored my mother. He was a good-looking guy and after Mum died in 1988, (my second wife) Gela and I thought we'd be able to set him up with someone. Whenever we brought it up, he would just say nobody could follow Jean, she was perfection. He taught me a lot about love. When my daughter (Atlanta, 21) and stepchildren (Travis, 24, and Zoe, 22) were going through school, we got to know teachers, did PTA meetings, soccer coaching. My parents were so different. I wouldn't go to school for days on end and they never heard about it. If there was a letter home, I would forge their signatures. I just wanted to spend all day reading the NME and hanging out in record stores. My parents took huge pleasure in my career. They had no ambition for themselves but had so much confidence in me. Becoming the biggest Duran Duran fan gave Mum a new lease of life. When we played Madison Square Gardens in 1984, we flew all the band's parents out. They went up the Empire State building and to Disney World and stayed in a five-star hotel. Mum had never left the country. They took those memories to the grave. Fans were always turning up at the house. My parents loved it. I still have people telling me they went to Simon Road one afternoon in 1983 and Mum gave them tea and biscuits and Dad drove them to the station. One Christmas, I went home to find four sacks of fan mail. They were so proud, but I was so off my head and angry and confused that I just lost it. They were bewildered by my behaviour. Witnessing Atlanta's birth (with first wife Amanda de Cadenet) could not have been more perfect. I loved spending time with her, but once I separated from her mother, I knew there was a certain quality of parenting she would never get. As a nuclear unit, you can do so much – good cop, bad cop, interchangeable parenting. I have a lot of friends who have been through breakups. I often think whatever you have to do to stay together, just try. My wife, my ex-wife and I all do the best we can, but it is uphill. It sounds such a gentle word, but blending families is a huge challenge. It puts demands on all the children. It is still a work in progress. There is never a point in parenting where you think that everything is sorted, but I wouldn't want there to be. I want to interact. I don't want them not to need me anymore. In my 30s, I was struggling to evolve into a responsible adult male. I had a hard time shaking off the hysteria of fans and pop stardom and slotting into family life. I kind of did, but then you don't count on the drugs and the alcohol. I was out of control. Being sober when my mother passed away was the most profound experience of my life. I wasn't disappearing or sliding down the sofa. I was entirely present and could be a rock for my father. You never stop missing your parents, but I am so grateful that getting clean gave me perspective on the important relationships and they both knew how much I loved them. At the time I met Gela (1996), I needed someone who loved me just for me. She didn't know anything about the band. I wasn't the ex-pinup, so the emotions were very clear for us both. — Guardian News & Media |
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