You find any shiitakes?

And this afternoon rushthatspeaks and I discovered why soybeans are a staple crop, because we started with a scant six ounces of dried beans set to soak in water last night and ended up with two completely different foodstuffs and more than enough for three people. The original plan had been to turn two-thirds of our homemade soy milk into silken tofu (which does not require pressing), reserve the last cup for the making of yuba (the savory skins skimmed off the top of boiling soy milk, like clotted cream), and make some appropriate side dish out of the okara (the curd-like leftovers of squeezing out the soy milk, which seem difficult to obtain without home tofu-making). For the first time, however, Nguyen's Asian Tofu failed us. The slight bitter taste that turns out to come from soaking and grinding the soybeans in cold rather than boiling water was not a dealbreaker in the sense of needing to throw the milk out, but it was pronounced enough that we were not comfortable using this batch for a tofu meant to be eaten fresh and essentially uncooked, with only our choice of sauces or relishes for enhancement. Fallback: we made all the soy milk into yuba and turned the okara into the main course.

(Nguyen's instructions for making yuba involve lifting the skin off the boiling milk with one's fingers, pinched at ten and two o'clock on the circle of the skillet in which the milk is heating. She encourages, "It should not be that hot." Her benchmark for that hot evidently differs from mine and Rush's—each skin stung badly until I appropriated a trick from chemistry class and ran my hands under cold water first. I still don't see myself sticking a hand into hot lead any time soon, but I worked at the tofu skins for an hour and a half after that without incident.)

The yuba came out in wrinkly, custard-colored ribbons, with the last dregs of the milk scrambled hot like eggs and dolloped onto the center of the plate. They were sweetish, with a translucent, slightly slippery al dente texture; we dipped them in soy sauce and wrapped them around slices of avocado and pickled ginger and they would make fantastic dumpling wrappers, also random snacks. (The scramble retained some of the milk's bitterness, which didn't stop one of the cats from sticking his face in it after dinner. We threw the stuff out and the second cat tried to get into the garbage can after it. No idea.) The okara, of which we had considerably more than expected, when toasted in a pan with sesame oil turned into something very like couscous: we cooked it with dashi and mirin, sliced burdock, scallions, and shiitake mushrooms, apportioned the resulting unohana into three bowls and ran out of room. Two forms of soy none of us had ever tried before. Both very tasty. And very high in protein, so at least we didn't lie around afterward feeling we had accidentally eaten the Chrysler Building, but there wasn't much call for dessert. Rush had brought mochi from Reliable Market. gaudior heated up mugs of cider. And we watched the second and third episodes of Hannibal (2013), which I had not gotten around to seeing on my own time. handful_ofdust, you're quite right about Freddie: she's the rare case of a wholly amoral female character who doesn't use sex for it. There is quite possibly no one with a normal range of empathy on this show, the lab techs with their deadpan back-and-forth included. I'm enjoying it.

Right, and then they showed me Bee and Puppycat, which I'm probably better off not even trying to describe. It reminded me of Gravity Falls. Especially the scenes that involve the phrases "ONWARD, AOSHIMA!" and ". . . bleventeen?" I can't tell if I hope there's more or I don't want to know.

And I ate my first apple of the season, absently, while checking e-mail on Rush's computer.

So far, this year, so good.