Lunch. the birthday party.

I work for a small, tightly-knit company, and for each employee's birthday we have a potluck lunch. The birthday girl (we're all women) tells everyone else what she wants them to bring, and they cook her favorite dishes. It is an excuse for us to all take a break from the craziness of the day, sit down together (which wouldn't happen otherwise), eat, relax, enjoy ourselves. There are main dishes and side dishes and hors d'oeurves and desserts and bowls of fruit and salads and rice and bread. The lazy-susan spinning slowly in the middle of the huge table is nearly invisible beneath the platters and dishes and bowls covering its surface.

Everyone has their own specialties. We look to one woman for her desserts, cheesecakes of every flavor, chocolate layer cakes, pies, anything you can imagine. I might make a lasagne, or a rum-soaked croissant bread pudding filled with raisins, depending on the whim of the birthday girl. One person usually brings a meat dish, grilled flank steak or chicken stew or on occasion, a prime rib. Another coworker brings noodles, yet another brings some kind of vegetable dish. Others bring salads and breads and dips and beautiful fruit. Most of us love to cook; certainly all of us love to eat. Cooking for each other is a way to experiment, or have a chance to eat something you would never make yourself. (I wait all year to demand a Kahlua chocolate cheesecake for my own birthday).

I've made lasagne this time. I woke up early to put it together, layering the sauce I made the night before with noodles and ricotta cheese mixed with egg and parmeggiano-reggiano and shreds of basil, and grated mozzarella cheese. It takes half an hour, and the unbaked dish will sit in our fully-equipped kitchen (did I mention that we love to eat?) until about an hour before lunch. I've got the timing down, the result of much practice. It is better this time, more richly flavored; the sauce seems thicker and more cohesive, perhaps the result of using a different brand of canned tomatoes. The cheese is creamier; the grated Parmeggiano-reggiano sprinkled over the top has baked to a crisp golden crust.

Besides lasagne there is a chicken stew, heady with white wine, sweet with dried prunes and carrots, sharpened with briny olives and the tang of tomatoes. Pale sweet taro mingles with chicken; thick noodles nestle in a deep dish, twined with vegetables. There are thick slices of crusty bread and artichoke dip, and chewy, salty-sweet pieces of roast pork. The co-worker with the organic garden has arranged slices of home-grown tomatoes with white coins of fresh mozzarella and basil leaves; adorned with more herbs and flowers it is like a bit of summer in the middle of October. And when we cannot eat any more, there is dessert, a Kahlua chocolate cheesecake and a pumpkin chiffon pie. And we start talking about the next birthday party, in November.

I love cooking for the people I care about, and I love other people cooking for me. Sure, we could go out, drink too many margaritas, eat overpriced food in noisy restaurants, and go home regretting that last margarita or that one extra piece of calamari. But this is better.

Experiments and variations on the same old thing.

I rather feel like cooking today. Last night I went to the grocery store and stocked up on all manner of good things. There is a lasagne to make for tomorrow's lunch, and a chicken to roast for my own dinner tonight. There are vegetables to toss with olive and sea salt, and a loaf of crusty sourdough bread. For the lasagne I have bought spicy Italian sausages, smooth whole-milk ricotta, a firm round ball of mozzarella that I will have to grate by hand. I want to try the imported San Marzano tomatoes, just to see if they are any different from the canned tomatoes I usually buy. I am making the same old thing, but with variations.

In the morning I prepare the chicken for roasting, sprinkling it inside and out with kosher salt. I'm too lazy to bother with a brine; besides, I don't have a bowl big enough to fit a bird in its salty bath. This will do. The salt will draw out extra moisture, which the flesh will reabsorb, making it tender and juicy as it roasts. I've probably roasted hundreds of birds by now, trying all sorts of different ways. This is the simplest. When I come home after work, I shake some black pepper over everything. I don't have a rack, or a roasting pan, but there is an enameled cast-iron baking dish. A layer of thinly sliced onion in the bottom of the dish will keep the chicken from sticking and tearing the skin, which is what happened last time (I learn from my mistakes, usually).

Usually I roast the beets whole, wrapped in foil, before slicing them and throwing them in with the carrots, but I want to try something different. I peel them and slice them into wedges, and do the same with the carrots. They are drizzled with olive oil and tossed with salt and roasted until tender. They are not quite done when I check on them, but I feel they need something else, and pour in some balsamic vinegar and honey, stirring the vegetables so everything is faintly slicked with the sour-sweet glaze of vinegar and honey. It's perfect. Something new.

While the chicken and vegetables are roasting I get the sauce for the lasagne ready. I've made this so often, like the roast chicken, I can do it without thinking. Some chopped onion goes into a deep dutch oven filmed with olive oil. While that cooks I grate some garlic into another bowl and slip the casings off the sausages. The garlic is stirred into the translucent onions; in a few moments everything is fragrant and pale gold, and the sausages are thrown in. When they are just browned and crumbled into bits I pour in the drained diced tomatoes, the chunky crushed tomatoes, and stir everything together. As I eat my dinner the sauce will simmer gently and then be put away to cool, and in the morning it will take hardly any time at all to put the lasagne together.

The roast chicken is moist and juicy, the skin crackling and paper-thin; the flavor of caramelized onion has seeped into the flesh. The scent of sauce fills the air, a promise of good things to come. It's been a good day.

Reading. Kingsolver.

The Bean Trees has been one of my favorite books for some fifteen years now, the literary equivalent of a mug of hot cocoa piled high with whipped cream, a warm hug. There have been other books by Kingsolver since, more complicated, more heartbreaking, (certainly longer), but this was the first one. The first one I loved. I have read it so many times that its language has seeped beneath my skin and become part of me. When I first read it I was over a decade younger than Taylor, and now I am older. (When did that happen?). Year after year I come back to the intertwining stories of Taylor and Lou Ann and the people who come into their lives and change it forever.

From the first sentence, I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign, I was unable to stop reading until I had followed Taylor Greer out of the only kind of future she might have had in her hometown (not much of one), across states, into accidental motherhood of a small silent child with her own haunted past, into friendships with unlikely people, into love. (And I have been afraid of putting air into anything, forget a tractor tire). The language was unlike anything I had experienced before; smart and funny, with the imagined echo of Kingsolver's Kentucky twang.

Everything she describes blooms as vividly in my mind as the night-blooming cereus did on Virgie Mae and Edna's porch. Years after I first read The Bean Trees we had our own night-blooming cereus in the corner of the living room, "flattened and spiny and frankly extremely homely." One night it bloomed in the darkness and filled the entire house with its fragrance. When I went to look, I found that homely plant burdened with flowers, each one hanging from its scrawny branch like "a magic mirror...made of some nearly transparent material that looked as though it would shrivel and bruise if you touched it. The petals stood out in starry rays, and in the center of each flower there was a complicated construction of silvery threads shaped like a pair of cupped hands catching moonlight. A fairy boat, ready to be launched into the darkness."

When I read that passage time and time again I feel myself sitting on the living room floor in the darkness, surrounded by the faintly lemony, haunting scent of the night-blooming cereus, the memory lingering like a touch. The book itself is a pair of cupped hands catching moonlight, launching laughter and friendship and love and motherhood into the bright sunshine of day, into a distant future happiness.

Saturday morning. breakfast. (Columbia City Bakery).

When I was quite small my baby-sitter would take me berry-picking during blackberry season, in the dog days of August. The back alleys of our neighborhood were filled with the wild fountains of prickly vines. R. and I took buckets and bowls and spent hours teasing ripe berries from their stems; the ripest ones would fall gently into our hands at the merest touch. Once she made a pie, black and oozing purple juice, but usually I would just eat them out of hand, or with ice cream. It's been years since I went hunting for blackberries. The wild vines at the edge of our backyard have been replaced with a forest of bamboo. I've moved away from my childhood home. But today I'm back for just a little while.

K. and I walk to to the Columbia City bakery for breakfast. Down our street, past the school nestled at the curve of the steep hill that takes us towards the now-bustling Columbia City neighborhood. Across the street from the school we find a tangle of blackberries. Even in October there are still berries lingering, ripe and sweet and juicy, and we pause to pick a few. As I eat the blackberries I am transported back into my childhood again. That moment passes, and then we walk on, eager for breakfast.

It's busy inside the bakery. There are families with babies everywhere you look. The eating area is full of light and pale wood; the glassed-in counter is piled with all manner of baked goods. Beyond the counter you can see the kitchen, with people moving around between tables of dough and ovens and whatever equipment they use to create magic. K. buys loaves of bread, one white country loaf, the other dark bread studded with walnuts. There are flaky strudels, one with berries, another filled with almond-scented cream and slices of pear. A handful of chocolate madeleines frosted with cocoa nibs goes into a paper bag for later. For breakfast I have a savory croissant, and hot chocolate.

Tables at the bakery are few and hard to come by on weekend mornings. I'm lucky to sneak over and snag one while K. pays for our bounty. Behind me is a case filled with trays of cupcakes and pumpkin tarts and slices of a deadly-looking chocolate cake. And then I'm sitting down and biting into the buttery flakiness of a croissant filled with a curl of ham and a sprinkling of cheese, and I am completely happy. The hot chocolate arrives, a heavy white cup and saucer, a swirling leaf drawn in its cap of foam, rich and creamy and chocolatey. K. rips into the bread, handing over pieces for me to try - the darkly nutty walnut bread, the pure taste of the thick-crusted plain loaf. I see E., an old high-school classmate that I have not seen in eight years. YOU! She points in my direction. I've met you before! I can tell she can't remember my name, though.

Sated and happy we head towards home. I pass E. and her friends on the street. I couldn't remember your name earlier but I know it now, she says. My past is everywhere today.

Reading. Lipman.

When I first read Then She Found Me I was in high school, years ago. It was funny and gentle and I loved it immediately. It is at once about how mothers and daughters, and about finding love. About how things happen when you least expect them to, how love may come slowly and unexpectedly, how happiness can bloom so quietly that you hardly notice that it has begun to change you, change your life. How someone who bursts into your life like a force of nature (a newly discovered birth mother, a boss who lives in a fantastical house on the beach) can push you beyond what you feel are your own limits, even if it only a brighter lipstick or a different haircut. Or in the direction of an entirely new life entirely.

There have been other books by Lipman, others which I have loved as well or not quite as well as the first one. There is something endearing about her heroines, women of all ages, growing up through childhood and young womanhood (in The Inn at Lake Devine), verging on the beginning of middle-age (And Then She Found Me), later in middle-age (The Ladies' Man). They nearly all have a sense of being a little bit lost, as though they are all in search of something, sometimes without even knowing that they are in search of it. A sense of themselves. Or love. There are relationships, too, between friends, between mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, how they can be complicated or complicating but are always there. Her voice is clear and bright and witty (and sometimes acerbic) and the words spring lightly, weightlessly off the page and into the heart. The endings never feel like endings; there are no goodbyes, just a pause as though the story continues on beyond the last page. They are like life.

When I am feeling down or alone or in need of solace, I return to Then She Found Me and find myself comforted. I turn to the part where April and Dwight run off to Provincetown, and at dinner she tells him that this was the high point of her romantic life so far, and this is the part that never fails to lift some part of me, make some part of my soul happy, when he says to her, "Six months is not a long time in the great scheme of things...it's a short time to feel the way I feel...I had accepted things about my life and didn't think it would happen, didn't think anyone would bring out the things in me that someone might actually find...compelling. And then this unbelievable thing happened. This dream, actually." And then I look at this story of two people, in their thirties, who had settled into a life that they thought was comfortable and familiar, until it is shaken up a little, and then they find each other, and I wonder if perhaps I might sometime find myself falling into this same kind of dream, someday.

On guilt and food. McDonalds.

At the drive-thru there is nearly always a car with small children ahead of me, small bodies visible through the back window bouncing around in anticipation for their Happy Meals with some chokeable-part-filled plastic toy, the paperboard box with the M-shaped handle, the chicken nuggets that aren't made of chicken, the milkshakes that probably don't contain any dairy products whatsoever. It sends a chill through me. And then I reach out my car window for my own paper sack containing french fries and a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a medium 7up, and the guilt washes over me in a wave. Set a plate of foie gras in front of me, a plate of crème brûlée with its heavy-cream-based custard, a thick steak and a mound of buttery mashed potatoes. I will dive in without the faintest quiver of a qualm. But standing in line for my Egg McMuffin and hash browns under the blinding fluorescent lights and gleaming tile, I gaze at the shiny plastic tables and chairs all around me, and I am sick with a sense of shame and failure.

We are inundated with facts about how disgustingly bad fast food is for you. It has been the norm - for educated people above a certain income level - to look down on the hormone-laden, fat-soaked junk that permeates American culture and is spreading like a disease around the world. For those of us who have a some amount of disposable income and read Gourmet and shop at Whole Foods and watch the Food Network there are somehow more options available. I have become one of those people who make cheeseburgers with organic beef and aged Cheddar. I have fried chicken fingers made with free-range chicken and imported Parmiggiano-reggiano (in olive oil). I am a snob in Prada flats and a gas-guzzling SUV. I should be the kind of person who, like Gwyneth Paltrow, would never eat at McDonalds. But I cannot help myself. And why should I?

The thing is - however good organic burgers and free-range chicken fingers are - some nights I am too tired to bother. Most nights I try to bother. I want to evade that nagging sense of guilt when I think about the crap that I put in my body, those extra fifteen or twenty pounds that could have been avoided had I resisted the M&M's on the counter, the Doritos my coworker brings to work (and perhaps, you know, excercised once in a while). I want to remind myself that even a simple omelet or a bowl of the homemade wontons I keep in the freezer is ten times better than a Super Value meal from the McDonalds a block from where I live. But then, every once in a while, I find myself craving a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese, soft, sesame-sprinkled bun, American cheese with the texture of melted plastic, thin patty of beef that is most definitely not organic and probably full of hormones and pesticides, tangy with ketchup, crunchy with onions and pickles, along with a cardboard cup of soggy-crisp fries, a cold soft drink at my side. It is five minutes of heaven, perhaps ten. And then the guilt washes over me, but I nudge it away. I'll be good tomorrow.

Reading. Lewis.

I discovered Michael Lewis in the late 90's, when my pop-culture-trained brain recognized him more for being the husband of MTV news-anchor Tabitha Soren and less for being the author of Liar's Poker. I read a series of essays that he had written about living in Paris with his wife and baby daughter for Slate magazine, another one about the birth of his second daughter (by now they were living in Berkeley), and a third about a trip he and his family took along the Mark Twain trail. At some point I remember reading a hilarious essay in Gourmet magazine involving his parents visiting them in Paris and the enormous amount of work involved in making a cassoulet. He was funny and self-mocking and witty and hilarious, particularly when his wife clearly has the upper hand over him in all matters, most of all intellectually, and his writing was completely addictive. Of course I had to read more.

When I first read Liar's Poker I was a college student studying Art History. By way of introduction Michael Lewis talks about how he went from Princeton, where he, too, had studied Art History, onto the London School of Economics, and then onto Wall Street. I saw no such future for myself, but I found his work incredibly interesting; he made economics and the completely foreign world of finance intriguing. Alas, I was not destined for a career in finance, and I soon forgot about Liar's Poker, but occasionally I would come across another article by Lewis and be drawn into worlds I had no previous interest in. Which brings me to Moneyball.

A few weeks ago an excerpt from Lewis' new book (The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game; I am waiting for the paperback before I read the whole thing) appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, a story about how several people managed to turn a teenager, who had basically no education, living on the streets, no family, nothing, into a top college left defensive tackle with a potentially brilliant football career ahead of him. (I think left tackle is the right term, but what I know about football is...absolutely nothing. What is this mysterious thing you call a field goal?). To say that I found the story moving undermines how deeply it affected me; what became clear to me by the end of the story was that Lewis had made a subject I knew nothing about, cared nothing about - football - and turned into something that I not only understood but found myself caring about. I wanted to know what happened to this boy whose life was completely changed by a series of interconnected people, I cheered these determined people on. And then I turned to Moneyball.

My earliest memory, besides food, is of watching baseball on the little tv in the kitchen. That is, I gazed blankly at the Cardinals playing against whatever team they were playing against (this was during our St. Louis years) while my father sat, transfixed. I will say that little has changed in the past twenty-odd years. But Moneyball is different. From the first page I was captivated. And this is the magic of Lewis, the magic of a really good non-fiction writer, the ability to take a subject, something, anything, and be so completely enamored of it, so completely immersed in it, and then - this is the difficult part - be able to express it in such a way that you, the reader, are transported into a place where you begin to understand, begin to care in a way you hadn't thought possible.

Dinner for one. matsutake mushrooms.

Fall is here, and it is time for mushrooms, probably my favorite vegetable. I might broil giant portabello mushrooms until they ooze black juice or sauté creminis (baby portabello mushrooms) with onions, toss them into pasta or stir them into beef stroganoff. But the wild ones are different. Simpler is better, all you need a touch of oil, a scattering of salt to bring out the flavor.

At Uwajimaya I find matsutake mushrooms, which are also called pine mushrooms. They grow nestled in the roots of pine trees, and when I buy them they are crusted with dirt and sprinkled with pine needles. The ones whose caps have unfurled like white umbrellas have less flavor and fragrance than the ones that are still tightly curled into themselves. At home I trim away the crusty bits, wash them until they are gleaming pale white. I have had them simmered in soup, chicken broth made heady with the scent of the mushrooms. Or drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and then broiled in the toaster oven. But there is another way, my favorite way.

There is a pot of chicken broth in the refrigerator. I slice the matsutake mushrooms, not too thinly, but not too thickly either. They are firm and white and fragrant. I've washed some rice, drained away all the water, arranging the slices of mushroom across the top. I pour in the chicken broth. You need chicken broth, homemade broth, to bring out the flavor of the matsutake, which will simmer and steam as the rice cooks. It is worth the trouble to make the broth, because how much trouble can it be to throw some chicken into a pot with some water, leave it to simmer while I putter around the house?

While the rice steams I slice some dried seasoned tofu, arrange the slim batons neatly in two rows on a plate. Finely chopped scallions are scattered on top, shades of green against pale creamy brown tofu. I pour thin streams of soy sauce and sesame oil over it all. The tofu is chewy and salty, with the sharp crunch of scallions and the heady intensity of sesame oil. I almost want to dive into that oil, but I only need a little to make me dizzy with its fragrance. When I am alone this is all I need for a meal, some matsutake mushroom rice and tofu.

The rice is perfect. I knew it would be. It is infused with the flavor of the matsutake mushrooms, which have a delicate, elusive aroma that I can't begin to describe. Not overwhelming, the way white truffles can be, but intoxicating all the same. The chicken broth gives just enough contrast to ground the lightness of the mushroom, and I cannot get enough. I dream about this all year until the season comes back again, and I can sit back and read as the scent of matsutake rice fills the air, until I can sit at the table and hold a bowl of golden rice in my hands.

Dinner with friends. (a drama in four courses).

hors d'oeurves. A. called Saturday to invite me to dinner the next night, and since she is one of the best cooks I know I eagerly accept. I arrive to find everyone waiting for L., who has gone out to the car and is taking an unusually long time to return, and an array of cold appetizers on a narrow table set perpendicular to the dining table. There is a sort of salad of finely chopped dried tofu, cilantro, and pine nuts, a coolly fragrant study of contrasts, the savory, chewy tofu, the crunchy pine nuts, the astringent, clean taste of cilantro (which I usually hate, but tonight find addictive). There are slices of - I think - beef tendon, translucent and spicy, and a platter of smoked chicken. L. returns, agitated - he cannot find his car and worries that it has been towed away.

first course. There are pots on the stove, plates of various ingredients arranged around A.'s gleaming, open kitchen. It is always a pleasure to watch her cook; everything is in readiness for its moment at the stove or simply waiting for its finishing touches before arriving at the table. While L. paces around, phoning various towing companies in search of his car, A. eases coils of wide egg noodles into boiling water. The noodles are tossed with beef braised with tomatoes and fresh arugula, which promptly wilts from the heat of the pasta and sauce. The beef is tender, intensly flavored, rich and savory in contrast to the slightly bitter greens. The conversation runs around in circles - where is the car? did it get towed? are you SURE you remember where you parked it? J. will drive L. to the towing yard to get the car, if only they can find it. L. is inconsolable. It is his birthday, and his car has disappeared.

main course(s). Finally L. can stand it no longer and goes off to look for his car. His wife, J., insists on accompanying him, leaving me, V. (a young German girl staying with J. and L.), and another couple, M. and J., along with our hostess. The conversation continues on the same theme....where's the car? Meanwhile we eat chanterelle mushrooms, with their light and earthy scent, sautéed with slices of pork (I think), sweet and savory all at once. There is shrimp stir-fried with tofu, slippery and soft and chewy, and a plate of Chinese greens, providing the same bitter contrast as the arugula did with the pasta. Sweet black cod is marinated in sake lees, the white fish made tender and intoxicating. We wonder if J. and L. will ever find their car. A half an hour has passed. V., being a visitor, does not know downtown Seattle and has no idea where the car might be, but she has a vague recollection of various landmarks nearby. Finally, stuffed to the gills and unable to bear the suspense, we head off into the night to look for the car on our own. A. wails in the background as two more guests slip out.

intermission. V. and I head outside, I asking her questions about what she remembers, she pointing out landmarks that they passed. One block north, two blocks west, one block south. And we find it. The car is two blocks away from A.'s apartment. It has taken us five minutes. Triumphant, we clap each other on the back, call everyone, and head back, secure in the knowledge that we have truly earned our dessert.

dessert. The rest of dinner is spent gently teasing L. about losing his car, or rather, losing his memory. There is cake, chocolate, layered with cherries and cream, and there are little steamed buns shaped and tinted like peaches (for longevity, they are a Chinese birthday tradition), filled with a sweet bean paste. And there is laughter, and love.

Favorite food. won ton soup.

In Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin writes about how she once had lunch cooked by a girl whose mother never cooked but was able to afford expensive Chinese help, and therefore concluded that everyone "should either have the good fortune either to be Chinese or to be rich. Either way, you can end up learning how to make homemade wontons and duck stuffed with cherries and fresh lichee nuts." I did have the good fortune to be Chinese but I never did learn how to make duck stuffed with cherries and fresh lichee nuts. (In my opinion it is a crime to do anything with a fresh lichee nut except eat it, the cool, sweet, translucent flesh bursting with juice in the mouth). And one of my earliest memories in the kitchen is of making wontons at the kitchen table with my mother.

There would be a bowl of filling in front of me, a pile of flour-dusted wonton skins next to it, a bowl of water at its side. With a pair of chopsticks I would dab a little knob of filling right smack into the middle of the square wrapper, fold it in half to make a triangle, and twist the far corners together and seal them with a little water, applied with a fingertip and squished tight between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. They looked like little heads wrapped in kerchiefs. We would fill trays and trays with these little dumplings, and freeze them. It only took a moment to boil some water, heat some broth, cook the wontons for a few minutes, float them in the hot broth, and there you were.

It is comfort food. There is soup, usually chicken, and there are the little dumplings, the wontons. As they cooked the skins would crumple and shrink tight around the meat filling. The filling was usually ground pork, mixed with spinach and tofu and seasoned with soy sauce. The skins became soft in the boiling water, like sheets of noodles. If you put too much filling in the wonton the wrapper falls off during cooking; too little and the balance of meat-to-noodle is all wrong. But it is worth the trouble of making them yourself, as it is with most foods. You could by premade ones, I suppose, and they are fine. But the pleasure of food lies partly in its creation, in the rhythm of chopping and stirring and the monotony of wrapping dozens of little dumplings with a few deft twists of your hands.

I have promised C. wonton soup, so here I am. The filling has a base of ground pork; I have sliced some soft tofu into cubes, drained them, and mashed them in with a fork until you cannot tell where the pork leaves off and the tofu begins. I swirl in the soy sauce, grate in some ginger. I've forgotten the spinach. No matter. There is a pot of broth simmering on the stove for the next night, or the night after. And then I realize, I can watch a movie and shape my dumplings at the same time, my ingredients and trays and bowls spread across the living room floor. The minutes speed by as I go through the motions - dab, fold, twist, dab, press. There are ninety little wontons lined up neatly by the time I am halfway through my movie. Splendid.

Up early on a Saturday morning. Uwajimaya.

I like to do my grocery shopping early in the morning or late at night, because I hate crowds. I haven't been to Uwajimaya for a while, that Japanese supermarket on the edge of Seattle's International District. The original one was a few blocks north, smaller and a little bit dingier. There was a café at one end, and a bookstore upstairs; I would go up there and read comics while my mom went shopping. Sometimes, if I was lucky, my mom would buy me Pocky crackers, sweet pretzel sticks dipped in chocolate, or strawberry frosting, or bags of White Rabbit candy, chewy milk-flavored candy wrapped in translucent rice-paper, which dissolved on the tongue as you ate it.

Later Uwajimaya moved to a much bigger, new building, with apartments upstairs and a parking garage below. Now there is a food court with sushi, Korean barbecue, Chinese noodles, different stalls selling whatever you might be craving. Everything is bright and gleaming under the high ceiling, from the fresh fish at the seafood counter to the plastic-wrapped meats in their refrigerated cases. There is a hair salon, a shop for trendy eyeglasses, a separate bookstore, an enticing housewares department with dozens of different kinds of rice cookers and a dazzling display of glazed ceramic bowls.

As you enter you see the bank of cash registers ahead and to the right. To your left is the produce section, piles and piles of fruits and vegetables. You could get your ordinary carrots and onions and mushrooms and zucchini, but why would you when there are jade-leafed baby Shanghai bok choy, shiny dark slender Japanese and Chinese eggplants, crisp little cucumbers. I buy some bok choy and cucumbers (which will be sliced and marinated with soy sauce and vinegar and sesame oil) and scallions (of which I am almost never without) and a white limb of daikon radish.

And then I need some pork (for soup) and cornish game hens (also, for soup). I've promised C. homemade wontons, so I get some ground pork for my filling. Wander towards the tofu aisle. There is soft tofu (which I need for my wontons) and firm tofu (for soup) and dried soy-marinated tofu (for...whatever). I haven't cooked like this for a while, and it is like slipping into something old and comfortable. I find some wide wheat noodles (for soup); a small bottle of sesame oil finds its way into the cart. Perhaps I will slice the dried tofu into strips, sprinkle them with finely chopped scallions, and drizzle everything with soy sauce and sesame oil. There is some sashimi, pale slices of white tuna. Hamachi collars will be sprinkled with salt and broiled until the skin becomes crispy. I need chopsticks; I need to liberate the rice cooker from my mother's kitchen. It's time to cook like this again, the way I used to.

On my way to the cash register I spy a gigantic pile of strawberry Pocky, which I can never resist. I am so elated that it is not until I am home unloading the groceries when it hits me. I have forgotten the wonton skins.

Reading. the silver spoon.

The shelf next to my bed is reserved for cookbooks, which I take to bed with me and pore over for hours, dreaming of dinners with friends, dinners of roast meats or braised stews, of pastas and potatoes, of chocolate cakes oozing on the plate or puddings like a warm hug. Each one is an old friend, either one I cook from all the time, or one I've never tried, only dreaming about the recipes within. Pages are marked with post-its. Some of these books have been discovered randomly, or recommended by a friend, or seen in the pages of a magazine.

The Silver Spoon is the bible of Italian cooking, with over 2,000 recipes. It is to Italy what The Joy of Cooking is to America, and has been a classic for some fifty years. Last year it was translated into English, and now it is mine. When it was mentioned in one magazine, I noticed. When yet another magazine burbled on about its extensive repertoire of recipes, I remembered it. When I came across it a third time, I knew I had to have it. There are cookbooks which have loads of pictures showing you each step, so you know the proper way to debone a chicken, stuff it with pâté, and tie it with string so it looks like a melon. There are cookbooks where the writer chummily expounds on how her daughter loves pink frosting on her cupcakes or her sister made her salads with this dressing. The Silver Spoon is neither of these.

There are few pictures, color photographs of the finished dish, or little pen-and-ink drawings of ingredients, the former seductive in their simplicity, the latter adorably amusing. There are recipes for things I've never heard of, such as buck's horn plaintain (a 'uniquely Italian vegetable...not a common vegetable in other countries and is difficult to obtain outside of Italy'), and vegetables that I wouldn't recognize if one bit me in the ass (cardoons), even if I've heard of them. Each recipe is a brief paragraph or two, organized by genre and then again by ingredient. There are eight recipes for sweetbreads, nine recipes for brains, not to mention recipes for hearts, livers, and what are translated as 'lights' - lungs. I can hardly wait to try them all.

Everything looks simple and mouth-wateringly enticing, a deadly combination. It reminds me of what I love most about Italian food, that at its best it is about the ingredients, without anything to distract from the purity of the main ingredient. It is unfussy, uncomplicated, and still refined. The writing is clear, and occasionally funny, in the way that things translated from another language often are. (The chapter on globe artichokes makes the point that their considerable fiber content makes them useful for the digestive system). I cannot wait to try the artichoke clafoutis, or the mozzarella pumpkin sandwich, or perhaps a braised beef with Barolo, and what would life be without a tiramisu or a chestnut cake?

Reading. Brodsky. (on Platonov).

In preparation for reading The Foundation Pit, I began with Joseph Brodsky's brief preface. Reading a writer you already love writing about another writer new to you gives a new dimension to your understanding of this new writer, and in turn reflects something new about the first one. It was some three months ago that I started reading Brodsky, fell in love with him; his words are to me what Venice is to him, a labryinth of disovery, an emotion that goes deeper than love. I discovered Platonov a few weeks ago, drawn to The Fierce and Beautiful World by its title and pulled into the stories by Platonov's use of words. There are writers who use language in such a way they almost seem to be reimagining it in an entirely new way, to make you see and feel in a way you never thought you could before, and Platonov is one of them. In his preface for The Foundation Pit, Brodsky shows you why.

(to be continued).

Favorite food. the club sandwich.

In Seattle there is a club at the top of the tallest skyscraper in the city, a private club where members can go for lunch or drinks or dinner. It has incredible views of the entire city from every window, including the ladies' bathroom, where each stall has its own sink and window. (The men's room, alas, has no windows and no view, but if the ladies' room is unoccupied a waiter might sneak you in for a peek at the view). When I was young, my babysitter once took me there for lunch (her aunt and uncle are members). It was so exciting to get dressed up and ride up the endless elevator - so endless that you got off one elevator mid-way up to the top and went to another bank of elevators for the rest of the journey - and arrive at the front desk, from where you would be led to your table, hopefully one by the window. I've been there many times since, and somehow it is always a beautiful day, and I can see the whole city spread out before me, the Sound on one side, the lake on the other, and mountains in the distance. As the sun goes down the lights of the city go on and by dessert everything is a glittering carpet against black velvet.

What else is there to order at the club but a club sandwich? Three slices of white toast, spread with mayonnaise, layered with slices of turkey and bacon and lettuce and tomato, neatly quartered into triangles. Speared with frilled toothpicks (a necessity to hold it all together), served with french fries on the side. (Later, there would be berries and cream in a crisp almond tuile cup). Inevitably the sandwich falls apart as you eat it, meat sliding off one side, lettuce and tomato falling out the other. There must be some secret to eating a club sandwich gracefully and without making a mess, but I confess in all my years of eating club sandwiches at every opportunity I have never mastered it.

I cannot live without sandwiches, and it is impossible to say which kind is my favorite. The club sandwich has a bit of an edge over the others, because it has bacon, and bacon makes everything better. The bread is always toasted, and there are three slices instead of the usual two, and it adds heft to the contrasting salty crunch of bacon, smooth turkey breast, crisp lettuce, juicy tomato, and the toast which has been softened by a smear of mayonnaise, which melds all the different flavors and textures together. Sometimes there might be a fried egg, or avocado slices, which add an extra richness to the whole thing. I love the club sandwiches you find in cafés or hotels in Hong Kong or Taipei or Shanghai; the white bread is different from the kind you find here, as it is sweeter and has a finer grain than American bread.

Around the corner from where I live is a restaurant that serves breakfast and lunch. It is big and sunny and slightly shabby and full of business people talking...business, or scrub-wearing employees from the hospital across the street, or patients of said hospital and their families. There are dozens of sandwiches and burgers and even breakfast (which is served until closing) and I can't decide until I see they have a club sandwich and of course that's what I order. On whole-wheat toast, because somehow I deceive myself that the, er, wholesomeness of wheat bread will counteract the bacon. It comes sliced into squares, instead of triangles; the turkey is freshly roasted, the bacon is thickly sliced, the vegetables are fresh, and it is a most excellent lunch. Perfect.

Reading. Osborne.

I remember clearly my first glass of wine. A muscat, a sweet dessert wine. Dinner, at the home of friends. J. poured me a very small glass (I was very young, but I don't remember how old) and sent me upstairs to pore through his vast collection of photography books. I rather think my love of photography and wine began then. The muscat was sweet and a little syrupy, golden in the dim light of the upstairs landing. It tasted of warmth and sunlight, left me feeling as though I was wrapped in one of those fuzzy blankets my hosts always kept on the couch. Whenever I came over for dinner I was always sent upstairs after dessert, where I would lay on my stomach on the carpet and flip through the books, or curl up with a blanket and watch tv, or take a few books downstairs to the living room, where there were more leather couches and cozy blankets, until the grown-ups finished talking in the dining room and it was time to go home.

There have been many wines and dinners at that house, but the other one that stands out in my memory is the Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon, 1969, which we drank one night when I was in high school. Sixteen or seventeen. I love Cabernet Sauvignon, the weight of it, the texture of it. There has never been anything like it before, or since, although I have drunk many a glass in searching. It is impossible to say what I have loved best. There have been cool white wines in Italy, Burgundies at Rover's in Seattle (because they have an extraordinarily good selection), the occasional Bordeaux. I think there is a bottle of Château Margaux lurking somewhere in the cellar, if we haven't drunk it already. In Montalcino we drank the extraordinary local Brunello di Montalcino, and, of course, my father has amassed a fairly serious amount of Washington state wines, mostly Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, perhaps some Merlot thrown in there.

I came across The Accidental Connoisseur, well, accidentally. I'm not sure when I bought it, but I was flipping through it recently and immediately realized that this is the one book on wine that I have been waiting to read. I find most people who write or talk about wine to be extremely tiresome. There is no point in standing around pontificating about what wine is better than the other, about France versus America, about oak and berry and flint and woodsy and flowery flavors and taste indexes and scores and whatnot. It's boring. Wine is wine. Good wine is good, and you should drink more of it. Bad wine is not worth drinking. The rest is bullshit. Osborne is not bullshit. He writes beautifully and clearly about wine in a way that I (as someone who only cares about wine in the sense that I like to drink it) can understand and even love. And then he gets into the heart of what I feel about wine.

Wine is about the moment, the way food is about a moment in time that cannot be recaptured. It isn't just about what you are eating and drinking, it is about the people you are with, where you are, what you are feeling at the time. If you are miserable, eating disgusting food with people you hate, even a 1982 Château Margaux may as well be grape juice. Unless you drink enough of it, in which case perhaps even dog food will taste like filet mignon and your dinner partner from hell will become Sharon Stone. That 1969 Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon is not just about the wine, it is about an evening spent with my parents and their friends, some grilled steak, much laughter; in that same way that cool nameless white wine is part of the memory of a dinner under the stars, somewhere south of the Cinque Terre, eating seafood and talking with my parents into the warm summer night. Those are moments of time, encaptured and enraptured by memory, and cannot be regained, although there will be new wines and new memories in the future.

Osborne observes that when Gerald Asher writes about memorable wines, he has to dip back into memory and not call forth, say, a Petrus '61 or a Lafite '29, but instead recalls a vino rosso he had at the Simplon Pass in 1962 or 1963. Asher says that he has searched for that wine for thirty years and never found anything remotely like it, before admitting that perhaps it was he who "created" it in the first place. "But the pleasure in any wine is subjective: we each bring something to what is there in the glass and interpret the result differently." What Osborne sees, and this is what I have come to believe after a decade of drinking wine, is that place itself is twofold: on the one hand, it is terroir; on the other, it is what is going on around you as you are drinking. The first is geological, the second psychological. And taste is presumably a high-wire act balancing itself precariously between the two. And this is why I drink wine, in search of that balance, that mysterious alchemy between my mind and my surroundings and my tastebuds.

Osborne, Lawrence. The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World. North Point Press, New York, NY, 2005. pp 89-91.

Eating. oxtails.

Years ago, at a friend's house for dinner (one of many; they usually consisted of barbecued steak, steamed Chinese broccoli, rice, and various other side dishes), my dad looked down at the platter of grilled steaks and exclaimed, "Wow! We never have meat like this at home!" (This was greeted with much laughter and the look of death administered as only my mother can give it). I doubt my mother has ever forgiven him, and with good reason. For someone who has long been an almost-vegetarian, my mother certainly knows her way around various cuts of beef, pork, and chicken. Growing up, particularly during the years my cousins lived with us, there were piles of chicken wings, mounds of fried pork chops, beef short ribs or oxtails braised with tomatoes and onions. I loved those oxtails, those gelatinous links of bone encased by rich, tender meat. They would simmer for hours, cooking gently, the tomatoes giving a sweet acidity to the sauce, which would be soaked up by the steamed white rice we ate with every meal. It is one of those dishes that always reminds me of childhood.

Later I would read Nigella Lawson's description of oxtails braised in stout (from How to Eat), which at the time was unobtainable in Britain due to mad-cow disease. It was a grown-up version of what I remembered from when I was young - my mother's version had celery and onions and carrots and tomatoes, perhaps a few bay leaves; I think it was all cooked in water. Here Lawson had used Mackeson stout, which "has a creamy roundness that suits the fatly honeyed flesh from the oxtails." (Her writing is so seductive that you always immediately want to cook every dish in her books). There is another recipe for beef braised in beer, later on, but it uses lean steak (for stewing), as it is part of her "low-fat" chapter, and if I'm going to be poncing about with a few pounds of beef and a pint of beer I want the real thing, none of that low-fat bullshit. There were the same onions and celery and tomatoes and carrots, with a few other herbs and spices thrown in. I would try this someday, I thought.

Some years after that I was temporarily on my own and came across a recipe for beef carbonnade in the New York Times magazine. Suffice it to say, it was not a success. Oh, it was edible, but not the culinary nirvana I had hoped for. I gave up. Months went by, and it was time to try again. This time around, I was winging it, and was met with howling success. I didn't use the various herbs and spices and aromatics that Nigella Lawson specified, because, well, I'm lazy. I didn't sear the meat, bring everything to a boil, and then put the covered pot into the oven because, have you tried carrying a fully-loaded Le Creuset french oven from the stovetop to the oven? Even empty, motherfucker is heavy, never mind piping-hot and filled with meat, vegetables, and broth (or beer). So I sear the meat and vegetables, pour the beer in, and leave it barely burbling away on the lowest heat possible. On the stove.

Because it worked so well the first time around I went for it again, beef short ribs and oxtails, dusted with flour, browned, simmered with caramelized onions and carrots in Guinness; this time I added mushrooms because they happened to be in the fridge. I made mashed potatoes because I don't have a rice cooker, although I don't really need an excuse to make mashed potatoes, with milk and lots of butter. It is everything I remember, the tender meat, the unctuous sauce, the sweet onions and carrots, the creamy mashed potatoes. And I am home.

Reading. Tolstoy.

When I was in college my life was defined by holidays, trips home, as though at school I was in suspended animation and when I was home life started again. Christmas, spring break, summer vacation, Thanksgiving. A friend of ours was diagnosed with cancer just after I had returned to school in January; I remember sitting on my bed in shock after hanging up the phone, I remember instant-messaging the news to my cousin in Taipei. At Spring break our friend was pale and thin from the chemotherapy; in the summer he began to look a little better, even though his cancer was very advanced. My last conversation with him was in August, just before I went back for the new school year. I walked him home as he told me about how his wife's cousin had been his college roomate, which is how they met. And he died the day before I went back to school after Thanksgiving. I remember hearing the phone ringing; it woke me up. I didn't need my mother to tell me what happened, I just knew, and I cried for most of the flight back to Rochester. While clearing out my desk a few weeks ago I found the letter our friend had written the year after her husband died. She described the months of his illness, his last days, his last breaths, in such detail that when I read it I began to understand what it would feel like to die.

I have never loved Tolstoy. I loathed Anna Karenina (which I have never finished) as a teenager, and in college I spent a semester studying War and Peace, which was fascinating in its intensity and enormity, the loose and baggy monster, someone once called it, although I had great difficulty in keeping all the characters straight. But it is The Death of Ivan Ilych which I have come back to again and again. It has always given me that curious feeling, that fleeting understanding, of what passes through our minds as we are preparing to die. We read it in high school, and it sent a chill through me; when I came across it again some years later it left me only with a sense of peace.

There is something incredibly simple about this story of Ivan Ilych, yet so detailed and complex; it might as well be called 'The Life and Death of Ivan Ilych," except for the beautiful finality. It begins with the announcement of his death, and how those around him, family, friends, colleagues, can still only think of themselves. And then you are taken backwards in time, into his childhood and youth, how he rose through the ranks of his career, how he married and had a family. And then, the slow passage of his last days, his illness, all the thoughts that flickered through his mind as he consulted doctor after doctor, as he watched his family and servants around him, concerned about their own needs and lives. He looks back to his childhood and all his previous notions about death, how his own life which he always thought of as comfortable and pleasant has actually been senseless and horrible, until, at last, there is no pain and no death, and then...

He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

Favorite food. mushroom soup.

There is a moment in From Russia With Love (the book, not the movie) where Ian Fleming describes the soup that Tatiana Romanova is having for dinner, just before she is summoned to a meeting with Rosa Klebb and ordered to seduce Bond. Fleming describes every detail of every scene in such minute detail that you are drawn into his world, from the opening description of the assassin's golden body sunbathing by the pool of his villa to the hot soup that Tatiana is planning to eat, made with dried mushrooms, and a few shreds of meat as a special treat. (I hope I've remembered this correctly, since I can't find my copy of the book). Whenever I have cream of mushroom soup I think of Ian Fleming.

Cream of mushroom soup is a childhood food. It came in a can, sliding out with a thump, a quivering, ridged, solid cylinder of condensed soup that you broke up with a spoon, added milk or water, and heated over a low flame. (It sounds disgusting when I describe it like that). I would stand over the stove, stirring the lumpy mixture with a spoon or a whisk until it dissolved into the smooth, creamy soup, pale beige interrupted by the occasional chunk of mushroom. We would sprinkle in a little more salt, a scattering of black pepper. It was what my mother made for me when I was home sick, warm and soothing. Because it came from a can, it always tasted the same, which is part of its charm. It was a staple in the school cafeteria, dipped up from a deep stainless-steel vat, getting thicker as you got closer to the bottom. The soup came in thick white cups; I would crumble packets of saltine crackers into it.

In college we ate cream of mushroom soup all the time. (For variety sometimes it would be cream of celery, or cream of chicken). We would add chopped mushrooms and onions and diced chicken breasts, all cooked in butter, pour the soup over rice, stir it together into a faux risotto. Comfort food. When condensed soup was four cans for $3 or something ridiculously cheap like that we would buy a dozen. Now I realize it has been years since I have made cream of mushroom soup from a can, although I've recently made it myself with chicken stock and mushrooms and onions sautéed in butter and olive oil, pureed in the blender. Without cream, it is lighter and more intensely flavored.

Restaurants serve it in wide-rimmed soup plates, rich with cream, sprinkled with parsley and drizzled with sherry or drops of some flavored oil. If you are lucky there might be croutons fried in butter. Nearly every time I see mushroom soup on the menu I have to order it. Today was one of those days. Lunch, at Palomino. They make their mushroom soup with Portabella mushrooms, serve it in little round gratin dishes. It is velvety and creamy and made bright with sherry and flavored with little bits of onions, and for a moment I am completely happy.

Reading. Gide.

Every spring my school would put out a book recommendation list. Students and teachers would submit their favorite books, with a brief synopsis, and a little booklet would be distributed in the library. Some books were familiar to me, other unknown ones were discovered on those pages. It was here I found The Master and Margarita, one of my greatest and enduring loves. But what I remember most clearly is how one of the teachers - she was not my teacher, but I knew her well; she was tall and beautiful and English, and I adored her - wrote about Gide. Try to read it in French, if you can, she said, because the language is so beautiful. La Porte ètroite, or Strait is the Gate, by André Gide. I took note of the title, the author, thought it sounded beautiful and mysterious, the way French novels always do, and promised myself that I would wait and learn French before I read it.

A year, perhaps two, went by, and I was in college. Instead of learning French and reading Camus and Gide and Sartre in their original language I found myself learning Russian and reading Bulgakov and Lermontov and Pushkin in their original language. I found myself wandering along the canals of St. Petersburg instead of the boulevards of Paris. But rather suddenly I found I could read French fairly well (after years of Spanish and some Italian, now all forgotten, not to mention a longtime love of French cinema), a little more than menu French but not quite enough to tackle Gide. Saint-Exupéry, perhaps, but not Gide. Never mind. It was time to begin. In those days I would buy piles of books I meant to read on the internet, from used bookshops. It gave me a thrill to see a package slip in my mailbox, walk across the snowy campus with my brown cardboard box in hand, eager to rip it open in the warmth of my dorm room.

Quite soon I found myself with a whole pile of books by Gide, which I made my way through slowly. (Hindered by the fact that my dad would borrow them and not return them, in which case I had to mount a rescue mission, but then I was always doing the same with his books). Strait is the Gate is possibly the most well-known of Gide's works, and it was the one recommended so long ago by my teacher, so it was there I began. I have two copies, nearly identical except for one appears to have been nibbled away by a rat in one corner, and the other is rather more yellowed around the edges, its spine more worn. I think they date from the 1950's, a time when paperback novels cost $1.10 (copy one) or perhaps $1.25 (copy two).

Gide is like music, very French music. It whispers in my ears and sends a shiver down my spine; each word is cool on my skin, like a kiss.

Eating. steak.

Once in a while I will think about going vegetarian, feeling guilty about savoring the grilled carcasses of dead animals, instead getting creative with vegetables and tofu with its myriad forms and infinite possibilities. And then the moment passes, and the craving for steak takes over me again. Perhaps, if I am lucky, I will go out to a steakhouse with my father and order a gigantic rib-eye or New York steak, a huge slab of expensively marbled beef, grilled until crusty and perfectly medium-rare. Perhaps there will be a mountain of garlic-scented mashed potatoes, or a simple baked potato, some green vegetables on the side. Burning-hot plates arrive, heavy white china gleaming in the light, and for a moment there is silence as we dig in.

However, dinner at a steakhouse is a rare occurrence, which is probably a good thing. Usually when I crave beef I take matters into my own hands. I've tried different cuts - New York strip, Spencer steak, onglet, skirt steak, rib-eye. We've experimented with different methods - under the broiler (somehow I always manage to set it on fire), on the stove, a combination of stovetop/oven. There have been different pans - a nonstick frying pan, a cast-iron grill pan, and a cast-iron skillet. Now I use the cast-iron skillet, barely filmed with olive oil and gently heated until smoking.

At Whole Foods the other day I bought a gigantic steak. Seriously, it was huge. I will eat half the first night and then save the second half for the next night, sliced thin and sautéed with vegetables. (In theory). Early this morning before breakfast I crushed several cloves of garlic and threw them into a ziploc bag with the steak. I poured in some olive oil, added a splash of Worcestershire sauce and a few sloshes of soy sauce. Left it in the fridge to marinate all day. This is a new conceit, totally unnecessary, but I love the flavor and fragrance of garlic, and the Worcestershire and soy sauces lend a certain depth to the taste of the beef, so I always marinate my steaks now.

I am not used to my new kitchen yet. It's smaller, with less counter space, but with a surprising amount of storage. I miss my gas stove at the old house, the comforting snick-snick-snick as the blue flame ignited and held. The old electric range at the new place is almost as old as I am. The largest burner has a tendency to tilt, pooling the oil at one side of my pan, but so far it has not seriously impaired my cooking. The exhaust fan is pitifully anemic compared to the behemoth of the old kitchen, but it seems to do well enough. The aged coils heat quickly and evenly, and in just a few minutes the lightly oiled cast-iron skillet (my faithful Le Creuset, a birthday present a few years ago) is smoking hot.

The sizzle of steak on the pan is like music to my ears. I leave it there to sear properly, putter around putting things away, taking out the garbage. I can hear the ssssssssss all the way out by the elevator (my door's open; I don't have the key. I can just envision myself getting locked out and rushing down to the concierge for the spare key while the steak burns to a cinder). I don't have chopsticks yet, so I use a silicone spatula and the back of a fork to flip the meat carefully. Another few minutes pass. It's done, and I let the steak rest on a plate, leave it for another few minutes before it's ready to eat. And it is perfect.