The mind of man had thought of everything—except that which was beyond his comprehension

So about eighty-five percent of today sucked like a shop vac, but I salvaged an hour or two with derspatchel in the early afternoon and in the evening rushthatspeaks and I made sesame seed balls with azuki bean paste for dinner. All from scratch. This was both much easier and stupidly more aggravating than it sounds. The deep-frying was fine, the paste mostly involved Rush setting the beans up to soak the previous night (and then blending and cooking them down this afternoon with oil and two kinds of sugar. An immersion blender is the most entertaining kitchen appliance I've encountered in years). Glutinous rice flour with palm sugar syrup, however, is the devil. It comes out a lovely blond color, but it dries faster than Play-Doh. It breaks. It crumbles. It sticks to everything but itself. If you wet your hands to work it more easily, you wind up dripping a kind of cornstarchy slurry everywhere. We gave up on finger-shaping the prescribed inch-deep cups for the bean filling and just hammered each section out flat with a wet rolling pin, then scraped the resultant (like a miracle of chemistry, suddenly dry and crumbly) splatter off the cutting board with a small sharp knife and extreme prejudice. Next time, we're thinking we should use more water on the rice flour than the recipe calls for and make the syrup with either brown sugar or the slab brown candy recommended by Andrea Nguyen if we can find it anywhere. That said: the dumplings came out looking like we'd ordered them at a dim sum restaurant. Also, tasting like it. Crackling and sesame-crisp on the outside, frying-puffed and chewy underneath with hot sweet bean paste melting in the center. Neatly round. Unsurprisingly filling, to the point where after four or five each we didn't so much make dinner after all. Homemade bean paste is better than anything I've ever had in a storebought moon cake: not so sticky (or so deeply red: ours darkened in the cooking to a kind of smooth taro purple) or so tongue-burningly sweet. I want to learn to make lotus paste now and beta-test the next batch on ratatosk.

Ray Harryhausen is gone. The last movie of his I saw was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in December, with its magnificent six-armed octopus wrenching San Francisco apart, never moving like a natural thing, all the more uncanny for it: magic, the fingerprints you could see it left. I will watch something stop-motion this week. I hope he had Medusa waiting for him at the end.