This year, next year, sometime, never

Prior to this evening, my major accomplishments for the day were cleaning two bathrooms and baking a nut-flour cake. (I was helping my mother around the house. My aunt is visiting from the West Coast this weekend.) As of this evening, I would say my major accomplishment for the day was learning how to make okonomiyaki with sairaali.

I do not know why Wikipedia calls okonomiyaki "Japanese pizza." They're both circular and you can put anything you feel like on them. By this logic, plates are a form of pizza and so are DVDs. My closest culinary referent for okonomiyaki came out when I exclaimed, after several minutes of stirring the dense, sticky batter of shredded cabbage, grated nagaimo, chopped spinach, chopped mushrooms, and pickled red ginger, "These are the snottiest latkes I've ever made."

(That would be the nagaimo. Japanese mountain yam. Dioscorea polystachya, the internet tells me. I have never encountered anything like this plant before. It looks like a perfectly straightforward tuber with a lightly freckled skin and a crisp white interior. We bought it packaged in shrink-wrap from H-Mart. It crunches when you cut it. So far, so vegetal. And then you begin to grate it and it's mucilage all the way down. It practically dissolves into whitish strings of glop. It looks like a handkerchief failure. Or an accident in a rubber cement factory. I would love to know, botanically, what causes this effect: it looks hilariously disgusting and it is responsible for the characteristic texture of okonomiyaki. If it's responsible for any of the taste, I can't hold anything against it except its appearance. Okay, and the fact that when raw it's an irritant to human skin, but the chemicals responsible cook off really quickly. I now want to try making latkes with nagaimo as the binder instead of egg—I've never really had a good recipe for vegan latkes, and judging by the fluffiness and the tenderness of the okonomiyaki, mountain yam feels like the way to go. There's some egg in the okonomiyaki batter, but it's not the primary liquid. I suspect it would work without.)

I had never had okonomiyaki before. Apparently it is difficult to get in the U.S., or at least difficult to get properly made. Fortunately, Saira knows how to make it; rushthatspeaks and gaudior joined us as we were moving from the chopping to the cooking stage; now I know that I really like okonomiyaki and I'm already thinking about other fillings that I would fold into the batter and other toppings I might want to eat it with. We had Kewpie mayonnaise, tonkatsu sauce, and bonito flakes. (I went home with the bag of bonito flakes. I have stashed them in the pantry alongside the various Korean foodstuffs yhlee has been sending me. The cats are becoming really curious about the dried seaweed, puffed rice, dried sweet potato, and now multiple kinds of fish.) Leftover spinach and mushrooms turned into a quick stir-fry on the side. It was ridiculously tasty. Afterward there was a sort of decompression period of hanging out, eating fruit, and admiring the blue-and-orange nudibranch Saira was knitting. Eventually I got a ride home and was pounced upon by cats who are simultaneously attempting to convince me that they have never been petted and never been fed.

So far, this weekend, so good.

Paper dreams tied up with bits of string

My short story "The True Alchemist" is now online as part of the second episode of GlitterShip, read by editor Keffy R.M. Kehrli along with stories by Vajra Chandrasekera and Sarah Pinsker. It was originally published in Not One of Us #51; there and here, it is dedicated to its inspiration Mat Joiner. I've realized my standard author's bio is way longer than works for podcast. I am made very happy by this reprint all the same.

I'm listening to reconstructed classical Greek music I haven't heard since college, courtesy of yhlee. My advisor lent me the CD originally; I used to listen to it while translating in the mornings, along with Eleftheria Arvanitaki. That was more than ten years ago. I lived in very different rooms then. I am thinking of it as a good omen.