I happen to be one of the handful of undergraduates in a fiction workshop with Junot Diaz, and after each class I come away with something that's said either by him or others, ringing in my ears. The other day what I kept thinking about was how he said (and here I paraphrase) he'd felt that there was only one dial to control when he began, but later, more emerged and you too might soon begin to see that your experience of the world has infinitely many dials, oiled knobs patiently waiting to be felt and turned between your thumb and finger like my grandmother feeling for the smoothness of silk. Freudian connotations aside (you know you've read too much about psychoanalysis when everything seems filtered through that dusty, soiled screen), this idea of infinite possibilities, of a world unraveling and unveiling itself under close scrutiny and disciplined reflection and action--and by extension the notion that reflection is action, that beginning to see those dials is to shape one's world just as profoundly as turning them; this idea appealed to me immensely, and not only because the metaphor involves a sense of touch and an imminent contact with this world.
Touch. Etymology relates the word to the Romanian
tocà, which means to knock--and there's another sensual image. Touch as a beckoning, an invitation, of a world beyond one's own making and imagination--a reminder that we are beings with bodies, that we feel our way through life simultaneously as we think and act. As I spent these past few weeks mostly reading and writing, with the most familiar touch being the greased keypad of my macbook and the pages of plays and books thumbed and dog-eared, it was with unearned joy--for when is joy not--that I attend to "real life things" such as making food. After hours spent on ethereal thoughts whose output can seem to scarcely exceed several meager pages with black scribblings on them, preparing food which takes significantly less time to perfect and enjoy and can be so easily shared with others is not an unsurprising relief. There's less pressure; if some crazy idea doesn't work out this time, there's always the next (also a good thing to remember when writing). There's also the simple delight of eating well, of taking pleasure in slices of Hamachi melting on the tongue which sensation I don't have a good metaphor for, or a bracing bite of ginger that clears the palate. Most of all though, I just enjoy the process of making food. I derive such easy pleasure from slicing a cool cucumber just out of the fridge, feeling the individual grains of rice as I wash them under the cold tap, rubbing olive oil and rosemary with my fingertips into cubed squashes and beets about to go into the oven, or delicately slicing a morsel of Fluke that's just been fillet'ed. And that's what's good about it; it hardly feels like work, and when the going's good, there's hardly a conscious thought involved even though I am clearly thinking. Or perhaps it's that my hands are thinking. In any case, making food can be an analogy for writing, or doing anything: to enjoy the result, and enjoy even more the process. It yields an easy yes to
Nietzsche's test of infinite recurrence.
When I started out cooking, one dial that I had thought untouchable was making sashimi myself. Sashimi was something fancy chefs did, not me with a second-hand knife and a plastic Ikea cutting board. But it turns out that over the years I've picked up some knife skills (with a Z), my second-hand knife was a hidden gem, and my cold hands which can be a bit of a nuisance in the winter, prove themselves helpful in keeping the fillet cool. Still, you don't
need all that, just like you don't need an all iron-clad nine-piece cauldron set, a hundred-acre organic farm next door, or a thirty bottle spice rack to make and enjoy good food. What you do need is fresh fish, a sharp knife, and a willingness to try it all. And by fresh fish, I mean sushi-grade. For this endeavor among all others, it is paramount to have good ingredients. I'm lucky to live within biking distance of a super fly fishmonger,
New Deal Fish Market; consult your nearest, coolest fish guy, or madam, as it was in my case. The knife I had wasn't as sharp as I had wished, but it was sharp enough to slice up tiny fillets of Hamachi (yellowtail) and Hirame (Fluke). And as for the willingness to try it all, let me just say that not only was it much cheaper to do this myself than to go to a restaurant (a little less than twenty dollars for nearly a pound, which, with rice and soup, was more than enough for three hungry girls), but also much fresher (that is, unless you go to a real sushi place where they kill the fish to order--and even so, the Fluke had just come in as a morning shipment: it was flapping on the ice). As for cutting the sashimi, I freely divulge that I have had no training whatsoever in cutting raw fish; there's surely an art to it I am yet to learn, but for the meantime I pretend and imitate the slices I saw in restaurants. What I'm trying to say is that you can do it too.
So in summary, here are the directives: talk to your fishmonger, get fresh fish, and cut it up, if you wish, on a pillow of long thin radish shavings. You can get a saucer of soy sauce with wasabi paste and another of Korean chili paste (gochujang) diluted with a bit of vinegar and water. Serve with a little bit of miso soup and brown rice. I didn't have pickled ginger, but fresh ginger did the job.
With the bones, you can cook up a pot of fish soup: toss in cubed daikon radish and tofu (possibly also mushroom, onion, garlic?), a spoon of coarsely ground chili powder, put in the bones and the head, bring to a boil, take it off the heat and eat with rice. Chopped spring onion goes really well as garnish because it offers contrast.
Enjoy.
Being back at MIT has been reminding me of the end of last semester, and in particular, a dinner I made for eight freshmen advisees while really I should have been writing a paper or another. But it was finals' week, and I had promised them, and I wanted to chop and stir and dirty pots more than I wanted to compose thoughts on a page. Writing has its own irreplaceable rewards, but not in a void--those rewards, for me, are in competition with others'. Besides, why not move with desire rather than a sense of duty? So I put together a menu (and I quote):
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