Kimchi is Life

 As I look to the year ahead, I think of the weather. The snowy days ahead, the mud season tease, the awakening of the impossible spring, summer heat, mosquitos, cicadas, autumn that seemed to take 90 years or 90 minutes to arrive, and finally, the terror threat of November into December.

I ask myself: Culinarily, what do I wish to achieve during this year? The only thing I could say to sum up the entire composite is that the underlying theme of flavors in my rock opera of cooking would be "maximum impact with minimum effort."

In case, throughout my rambling ranting, I have not made this absolutely clear: this is what Fight4Taste is all about. I look back at the tattered calendar of the last year; some plans are memories, and some memories never materialize. You win some, you lose some. Three dear friends went down with the ship, and there was nothing I could do. 

As I contemplated being practical, I found myself in the sand, digging for treasure that I already knew was not there. I persisted, and in a couple of short circuits, my senses returned, and I seriously asked myself what I was doing. I would never need the things I was collecting. 

Sunrise and the scene is different. I see roads and trails that were not visible before last evening. Is it a dream? Will it slip away? I know what this is. The rest of the random particles have been traveling through the void. Refracted light has bounced off a particulate or two, allowing me a gracious thought or reference, but if I were to be challenged at the border by the guards demanding my credentials, I dare say it ends there.

My new rank dictates decisions, actions, and plans. I know in my heart I have earned every last bit of it. If I fail to take action, all the adventures ahead are unknown to those in the lands that these roads and trails lead to. Will I be the killer of that era? Doubt is doubt is doubt, by which I mean;

Doubt is that which causes me to pause.

Doubt is the potential destroyer of the future.

Doubt is the tool that shows others they can do anything they can dream.

You asked me where the door was. I did not even see one. That is when you told me there were three. This is just what I needed. Patiently, you repeated those words over and over until my eyes were open, and the doors began to become visible. This is where the days of weakness and tired soul must dwell. 

In the darkness, the violins struck hard like rapid-fire thunder in the rose garden. How can this exist without me? But as I stared down my own mortality, I knew I only own my version of this. The empathic marketplace has been around longer than any of us imagined. Seriously?

I consolidate, I reorganize. I get high, then I get low. I cash my chips in and count them slowly, realizing I must make every minute count. On the one hand, I need to slam things around and get it done; on the other, I also need to carefully dust the sand off broken pieces as if with a fossil brush to discover that which is sublime and leave behind the substance I will pay storage on and yet never touch again. 

I am not done yet and maybe have not even started. I told my oppressors they were in trouble, and they were not so quick to believe it. But they will know they have failed when the glass shatters and the burning steel contacts my hand with such velocity. Pain, a drain on energy, the very air around us that tells us, we cannot. But I can, and I am, and I will. There is no "no." Deal with it.

In my writing, I realize I have returned to my abstract roots. It is often designed to not name names when an actual story is being told. Today, in these words, it is more to depict the struggle I face daily dealing with wanting to do something with food and time. I have so many great ideas, and I feel they can be inspiring. I have been fighting pain for the last two decades whatever. For a year and a half, I am accompanied by the sound a ciccaidas screaming in my head 24 hours a day, so be it. 

For so much of my life, I have collected endless information. The problem is that it was all in fragments, as if partial novels were disbursed from the clouds and dropped into the land where I lived. Many are fascinating, practical, and useful; others are interesting but have little value, and others I do not understand. For the first time, pieces of this puzzle fit together. Undoubtedly, a gift from the girl who landed in the spaceship over 3 years ago guided me through my whole life and walked with me for 2 years. I never did get to thank her before she disappeared.

The clarity of my ideas is being challenged by my pain and affliction. But when the fragments start making sense, I know I can create so much and show others that they too can do anything, explore their strengths, cook for their loved ones, and not give in to the machine that seems to dictate to us as if we were drones.

Kimchi is like this. It is alive. Anyone can follow a recipe, but a successful batch is a perfect storm of life. Everything falls into place when you really understand what it is to make it and how natural forces must be achieved. Those forces allow the process to make something out of things that previously seemed unrelated. They become one, they make sense and Kimchi becomes life.

The West Pacific Sunrise

 I was hanging in my weakness, 

the waves of fruitless thought.

I took the steps I had so carefully crafted, 

smashing them with shame that only I could perceive.

I saw fantastic strangers who wanted everything I wanted.

They were clinging to rafts of their creativity.

I saw them as mentors, and they saw me as theirs.

Like me, they fought for dreams, moving one thread at a time.

Photo by Aidan Kahng on Unsplash

I do not understand how I have blocked out the sound of reassurance.

I have walked the shore of self-doubt for no reason.

I saw them flying kites in the breeze, and I was astonished at their skill

They complimented my craft, and my past slapped me for listening.

When the sun lit the water then slowly touched the sky

I heard a noise that it was making, and it was fine.

I held my thoughts of self-depreciation at bay so that the work of my hands 

could prevail with the sound the sunrise makes.

I am listening now, my inner voice subdued and held down, and I am never allowed to speak.

I have heard enough of that and will now listen to your words.

The sun is rising and it is time to acknowledge that.

Waiting for You

 I met a girl, and she opened my eyes.

I wanted things I never wanted before.

She shared stories that I never knew existed

Tales I never could have imagined.

When I awoke she was nowhere

Out on the front porch, I noticed a glow on the horizon

I knew what I had to do

I rode off into the frontier.

As the years went by I grew in knowledge and wisdom

I could tell by the feel of the wind when it was time to go

One great adventure after another, she always led me

It was a cool evening and  I saw her walk by

my creativity surged with no limits

but then I turned to look and again, she was gone.

As the years go by I find that I need to push forward on her memory and what she showed me

Every time I see her, I watch and miss her knowing she will disappear

Our encounter becomes more of a deep well giving water endlessly only if I strive to remember.

Today I have to search inside and look for ways to bring her into my day.

Some are crafty deceptions, some are close encounters with her

Together, these make me possible, pushing forward. Ever pushing forward.

Rewards at the Kitchen Counter

For some reason, I am the type of person who needs a return on investment for all aspects of my life. This includes going on vacation. Vacations are not something that I do often or easily. I know that I am wrong in this, so I do try to break the cycle. 

If I go out to eat at a restaurant, it is a disappointment if I am not inspired to add a recipe to my portfolio. It doesn’t have to be the exact meal that I had at the restaurant, but I do like it when it sparks something and made to create something that I would not have otherwise. 

Seeing what someone can create in a dish can be an artistic expression about is in there her and soul. It is very much like reading a poem or a paragraph in a novel that brings tears to your eyes, food is the same way. It fascinates me that food being something that we all have in common, that we must eat every day, that there is not nearly enough awareness of its power to heal, celebrate, nourish, and elevate.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I also know that there are so many people in the world that scrape crumbs together just to find sustenance and even then it’s not enough. This is certainly a tragedy that should never happen and yet is the most prevalent. I will not pretend in this composition to have any cure for that.

I just got done reading Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kat Flynn. She had recently finished culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in France. She was in a grocery store and she observed women walking around with nothing but processed food and frozen dinners and their shopping carts. She started asking questions and out of that she found nine volunteers to attend a several month cooking class that she gave weekly. The goal was to demonstrate why process foods are unneeded, unhealthy, expensive, and do not save time. The nine volunteers that she found were very different from each other, so I would say that she covered a grand spectrum of people representing all walks of life. 

When I found this book last winter in a secondhand bookstore, I knew it was going to be a treasure because it spoke to me on a level that I have been trying to express myself on for so long. I always suspected cooking was not difficult and that what it produced Could beautifully represent the person creating it whoever they were.

The result of this experiment was not a rubber stamping of techniques or procedures, or even recipes, the end result was the liberation of the person inside to be able to create healthy and delicious food for themselves for their families and to inspire others, to quote Captain Spock, “Each according to their gifts.”

You can get to know a person through the food that they are making. The more adverse the situations under which the meal has to be prepared, (except you, cutthroat kitchen, I’m not buying it) The more the makers creativity will shine.

There is one thing that I have learned from this book it is that I need to go home and deprive myself of being able to go out and buy specific ingredients and see what happens. I have lived  like that in every aspect when it comes to provisions and it is time I applied it to the culinary side.

Sometimes I do not know how to translate what I feel inside about cooking and how it comes out, but I am trying constantly. There is adventure, there is joy, there is discovery to be had. One thing that is for sure, I will keep on trying. I will not give up. 

Stop the madness

Sometimes, I wonder what is up with me. I have taken the food business thing further than I ever have before. I absolutely am pushing forward too. I was all set to apply for my catering license which will allow me to produce and sell food made at home, but I do need to take the Serv Safe Managers Certification. That is the big one, and once I have that, apply for the license, undergo an inspection. Because I have not had the time to study for the test which is actually administered live on video with a real person, I have not moved forward in a month.

I had an early morning meeting at work yesterday which caused me to skip breakfast. At around 11, I ran up to a local gas and convenience store that had a food kitchen with a drive-up window and dared to call itself a "Bistro", desperate for something to eat. I knew it would not be good, but how bad could it be? 

As I looked at the warming bin's offerings and its ridiculous prices, I knew I was in trouble. I ignored what I knew and kept steady on the effort knowing that I must make a choice out of things I did not want to eat. Scary things that sounded interesting, such as fried hash browns with bacon egg, and cheese embedded inside of them. I could only imagine those ingredients having at some point being in a blender.

I picked up something called a "breakfast empanada". It was flaky on the outside and was shaped like those old hostess fruit-filled pies from the 70s. Other than those two words, there was no description of what was inside. Although there was a paragraph of fine print ingredients printed on the back of the label, the best I could see, it was merely a list of chemicals and may as well been a Material Safety Data Sheet. 

 Needing to cut to the chase I asked the people behind the counter what was in them, (I am not picking on them) who were the most un-culinary type of people I had ever seen.  I could picture them sitting on rocking chairs in rural western Pennsylvania on the porch of a run-down cottage. Everything was so out of place that it is still bending my mind even now. I was told egg, sausage, cheese, bacon. With tears in my eyes, I bought this abomination.  You guessed it, it tasted just like a Dunkin Donuts breakfast sandwich, by which I mean, dusty cardboard.

For lunch, none the wiser, I went to Walmart to get the things we needed for the house. There is that Twilight Zone-ish void that happens sometimes when you are at Walmart. You go in, walk around for ten minutes, and suddenly, you cannot account for the last hour. If aliens are experimenting on us, then most likely, they are anesthetizing us while shopping, and doing who knows what, leaving us with these gaps in time while Walmart provides the perfect cover for them.

Suddenly I realized there was no time for lunch, so I went to the hot food bar.  I already knew I was in trouble. My friend Dave has warned me about this place. He once said he had to resort to this place providing most of his meals one winter in Florida. "I don't know what sort of Satanic Nutrient Extraction Process they use on that food, but I started to notice I never felt good anymore. If I had a cut, it never healed." As I stared down the barrel of my options a friendly patron stood next to me, smiling and telling me, "They are just pulling fresh mozzarella sticks and popcorn chicken from the fryer now." I should have listened to him, but instead, I blatantly ran into the culinary dumpster choosing a 6 pack of chicken wings that was already in the warmer.

After eating this back at the office, I had to clean the area, remove the trash, and change the bag, to get the non-food, burned-down-village smell out of my workspace.  Texturally it had to be similar to what it would be like to chew through a plaster wall. The next morning, I could still smell a faint remnant but could find no surface that was not thoroughly cleaned.

It gets worse. Friday back in the office, I had lunchtime errands to run and had no time to select a decent lunch. Avoiding McDonald's and its familiar assault I stopped in Hannaford and checked their hot bar. Stupidly not learning my lesson, I grabbed the bag of Nashville hot chicken tenders, bent on righting yesterday's wrong, hammering the square peg into the round hole. What ensued was 10 hours of intermittent stomach cramps

I have no one to blame but me and I know that. But let me tell you something. We as a society NEED to get it together. This non-food food is so abundant I get worried that the real food will disappear!  We need to stop the madness! How on earth can they charge what they do for this Frankenstein like garbage? I am of course an idiot for buying this crap and that is on me.  I needed this lesson, however! Nothing lately has shown me more than how important it is that I push forward. It is not just for me or for my family. It is for the good of everyone!  I owe it to myself and yes, I owe it to you! I need to take this very bad thing and make it into a lesson and a motive to do it. It is always rage that makes it happen for me, everything else is not enough. After all, it is in the name: FIGHT FOR TASTE!

The less is more factor

That one soul-soothing, warmth-distributing, bitter, and sweet taste gifted by the roasting and grinding of tropical beans.  There is nothing so perfect.  It is one individual ingredient that can boast a significant level of perfection in all the stages it reached before it arrived in my kitchen. But it is not over. It then still assigns a serious responsibility upon me.  I have the opportunity to respectfully carry through this fantastic journey or to make all of those previous efforts worthless.

I would like to think that my efforts have been worthy of this beautiful spoil of the tropics.  I was brought up to use gas stoves from the 1940s and 50s to percolate a fine brew on a daily basis.  It is a simple process, but if even the basic common sense is not considered, the failure is complete.

I have used my fair share of mindless plastic and glass electric coffee makers, selling my soul for convenience.  We all have those days in which as the day begins, any effort is too much.  Upon finding a nice warm pot, and kicking off my digital timer on my kitchen counter, gratitude overflowed within me.

I love the French press because it, like the percolator, yields the entire essence of the brew, including the oils that paper filters leave behind. Coffee syringes, and espresso makers in their many forms have been entertaining and have been interesting in their never-ending methods to reach the destination.

The one method that is so simple has proved to be more complex than I could have imagined is the pour-over.  They come in various forms costing anywhere from a couple of dollars, up to an infinite amount based on material composition and aesthetics. This method is really the electric coffee maker without the electric and without the coffee maker.  It is a plastic basket, a paper filter, and grounds that water gets poured through. Simple right?

With ten months of this year behind me, I can tell you that the majority of my morning coffee was made in the pour-over. I have learned from the dramatically different results that details really matter.  First, the paper cone-shaped filter that is in the funnel is wet with water that is over 150 degrees. When it comes to adding the coffee I always thought, more coffee, more flavor.  But this is not true. There is a balance that somehow, a measurement warning silently goes off inside of me when I have reached that optimal level of coffee grounds.  I have put this to the test and it is so precise that it is granular.

Next comes the bloom.  It is where the just-under-boiling water is poured into the grounds until they rise into a snow cone-shaped bloom...and stop.  It is important that nothing happens for at least the next 30 seconds.  I am sure we can conduct real studies to unfold all of the science that supports why this step is so important and fruitful, but I don't care.  We are so close to that morning joy.

Now, with the kettle in one hand and teaspoon in the other, the water is slowly poured again, but this time, the grounds are gently swirled in a circle, floating in a whirlpool for 20ish seconds.  It is important to not do this too long because we want those coffee grounds to settle back into the filter so that as much water as possible can now pass through the activated coffee.

Continue to slowly stream the water circularly until the water is close to the top and then walk away.  Once it stops a running stream, what is left behind is refuse. And that's how it is done.  With too many grounds, the coffee is weak and miserable, too little, weak again.  No bloom, weak in a different way. Swirl too long, bitterness. Drip too long, bitterness.  The notes all must be played correctly or the day starts off with failure. 

As I poured the grounds into the filter yesterday morning, noticing how everything in me tells me when to stop or if I need just a few grams more, I instantly wondered, how many signals do I ignore just like this during the day? Or how many things do I put too much effort into hoping for a significant return, when all I really needed to do was to hold back a bit?  Is it that simple?

 Paying attention to the effort invested can be very revealing.  A couple of weeks ago, I put together a family favorite meal, homemade chicken and broccoli over rice.  It is a delicious Chinese savory meal that never disappoints.  As I made the sauce, which is the most involved, multi-ingredient part, I placed a bowl right next to the one I was working with and made two of them side by side.  The extra effort was minuscule. I then poured the 2nd sauce mix into ice cube trays and froze them, transferring these cubes to a Ziploc bag the next day.

It was a rewarding return on investment this week, when weeknight's lack of ambition to cook set in, and this step was already done.  I feel there are so many things in our lives like this that can help us get to where we want to be, without the exhaustive effort that we often feel it could take to get there.

These subtle prizes can be anywhere, from deciding that there are five two-dollar items that buying 1 extra of on shopping day can save a trip into town many times over, to yes, setting up and programming the timer coffee maker if you use one.  

How do we identify the less is more factor?  I think it is different for everyone.  The goal is, not to do more, but to free up time to do the things that are more important.

 

Betting on insecurity

  “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality, nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” -Christopher McCandless.

As we know, Chris ran headfirst into the philosophy of waking up under a new sun every day.  It did not end well because of a series of life-ending micro miscalculations that occurred over many months, in which the sum total of were fatal.  Remove just one of those miscalculations and he would have lived to die another day perhaps. 

Could some desire for a secure future be needed to allow Chris to identify the traps?  Personal defiance is similar to an argument that we have with someone in our own heads.  It is only self-inflicted injury.

I do however feel that the words quoted above are extremely important.  I have indeed jumped in the dark, never knowing if there was a place to land so many times in my life.  These are the times that led to the best experiences I have had.  When I say best, I do not mean that I was warm, dry, and comfortable at all times.  Many times I was none of these and was not sure how badly things would turn out, but the opportunity to learn and succeed is rampant at times like these.

There is a natural tendency to strive for that secure future when you have had an insecure past. There are many tools that are brought on that journey. I perceive the danger is that we strive to make things better, which means really, to make them take minimal effort with the maximum return, by which I mean... boring.

This is where the slow death begins.  This is probably why I hate the idea of electricity.  It nullifies people and makes them dependent on an ever-increasing slope. It is a drug that we are being poisoned with.  Dulling us with convenience, our memories of how to carry out useful tasks fade into nothing.  Before my entire self is gone, I desperately grasp at my skill sets, not allowing those who wish to delete them to have them.  This is where things become strange.

There is a corralling happening under the disguise of volunteering. Be content, be comfortable, fit the mold, and be a good little drone. Let the grocery stores and the ready-to-eat food producers continue to tell us that they are the only ones who can provide a secure daily life.  

The fact is, "they" are so wrong about most of everything.  It is why hikers come home after 6 months on a trail and thin out their possessions.  It is why, despite the propaganda, you can live without electricity, internet, and public utilities. With the smallest bit of forethought, most of the dire happenings in the morning news will not apply to you. 

The "news" has never been so useless as it is now.  Be real.  Be yourself. You can do it, I know you can.

Good morning in the morning

 What have mornings meant to you as you scroll the pages of your life? It is interesting to think of all of the different kinds of mornings that we can experience.  From my childhood summer mornings, I can recall, setting one foot on the floor followed by walking straight out the door to see my friends.  Another day's adventures awaited.

Those much too early wake-ups in which we sprayed the grass the night before with water to get the night crawlers to surface, so that we may select them for participation in our early morning fishing trip.  2 hours before before sunrise, very little sleep, we drove toward lakes and rivers with the hopes a very good day. It is a journey into a world that somehow does not exist, until this misty morning.

As a child, I woke at 4 o'clock and tuned into the airwaves from hundreds of miles away.  Learning about places I did not live, and getting to know people I did not know.  Warmth traveled across the stratosphere until the light waves from the east strangled the radio waves out. This friend is to return tonight after the sun sets in Western New York.

Early morning, in a hole in the dirt in Kuwait, dug into a minefield.  I was in the eye of the storm and because of that, I did not know what was happening.  I sat in my hole, sunrise seemed 100 hours away.  I carefully tuned my Walkman, looking for news I could scrape off the AM dial in English.  Through bits and pieces of Voice of America out of Africa and the BBC World Service from London, I found out my position in world events.  Then, like a beacon of hope, the BBC began to spin the song Disappear by INXS.  There was so much power in the moment, I could never explain it.  To this day, when I hear that song, I can feel that spot in the world. It seems that we leave a piece of us in those places that have that much gravity.

The sun did rise that day. Unbeknownst to us we had actually been ahead of the armored division that we were supporting. They hammered through like a storm.

A few days later it was 3 o'clock AM.  I awoke from sleep where I always slept, the hood of my truck.   I listened to the president call the cease-fire and that he looked forward to welcoming thousands of us home.  It seemed impossible, yet it was happening.

Those mornings in which I started new jobs, and let me tell you, there have been a few.  I remember all those first days of school with the smell of new clothes everywhere. An old friend once further described a grammar school morning. Gray fall skies, and maybe drizzle while inside, bright florescent lights hummed overhead. 

The early morning hours were my father's last hours.  In the wee hours, we went to the jetty and should not have been there because the wind and the waves were a rage. The sun rose out of the Gulf of Mexico as we sat watching, the warmth of a 7-Elevin coffee in our hands.

The first days of school for my children and the subsequent days that followed with their roller coaster highs and lows.

There are infinite possibilities when you wake up in the morning.  I do feel sometimes that routine has taken over, coffee, wood stove, commercials for injury lawyers, skin remedies, coin and jewelry resellers, and automobiles. <Yawn> All I could say is there is still a chance to mix it up.  Read or write something, listen to music instead of turning on the droning morning news. Cook something tasty. Do something you love. 

Just have a good morning.

It's late, but not too late

 

 As I sipped my coffee on a cold Vermont morning in January 2022, I silently asked myself, what are you going to do this year?

I am not into the resolution thing one bit. I see needing a date to start a new habit as a crutch to circumvent laziness and procrastination. My avoidance of resolutions is almost as unsettling as if I were to embrace them. Sometimes, you just need to back away from the over-thinkers bar.

 

Whew! Almost lost my white blazes there! “I want to make Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington and I absolutely want to make Okonomiyaki” a savory Japanese pancake mostly consisting of cabbage, and pork belly, topped with scallions, special sauces, and bonito flakes.

 

So here I sit in October 2023 and neither of these were done. I kept telling myself that I would get around to it.  I first watched June Xie make Okonomiyaki on a beloved episode of Budget Eats about 3 years ago.  Of course, with ninja class, June involuntarily pulled it together using the items she found on super-sale in Woodside, Queens New York.

 

It was this free-range portrayal of Okonomiyaki that made it so clear to me that this was a piece of culinary ambition that would tell much about the person making it and could express in taste and presentation where that person came from.  Their joys, sorrows, and expectations are all on a plate waiting for conveyance through the enjoyment of others.

 

As I write this I am listening to Traffic's 1971 LP, Low Spark of High Healed Boys. The pace is right for these words. If you know it, you know what I mean.

 

In July I signed up for a Japanese cooking class for mid-September.  I should have paid closer attention when I did. There was much more to the story.  The class was fantastic and while there, I learned that this was a once-a-month event, all of which I would love to participate in.

Upon returning home, I got right onto the website to find that October's class was Okonomiyaki, the great crown jewel that in my estimation had cunningly evaded my capture of it. Finally!  Then... waiting list, which is where I remain to this day only 5 days prior to the class. I knew what I had to do.

It was time to take matters into my own hands.  Yesterday, with all of the love and care that I could give, I painstakingly slivered up the green cabbage as fine as my knife and steady hand could physically muster. I made the batter and with the cabbage and scallions, I rested that in the downstairs fridge for the next 18 hours.

I often find that using pork butt/shoulder is a worthy substitute for pork belly.  So I thinly sliced port shoulder into thin narrow slices resembling bacon. I knew then that sometime in the next 24 hours, it would happen.

Not so thankfully, RA pain and sleeplessness had me awake at 4:30 this morning.  Once I surrendered to starting the day, I knew it was time.  Noah was getting ready for school and why not start his day with Okonomiyaki?  

Let's just say my kitchen was not exactly ready for it.  I usually go to bed with a clean sink, but not last night.  So, every horizontal surface in the kitchen was utilized as I figured out my newest, and not difficult at all quest.

The end result was excellent.  Yes, Noah went to school with a good meal and one that I would be willing to bet, no one else in attendance there had the same.

In one creation I see why I was so attracted to this dish. I see why June chose it in the Budget Eats genre. Okonomiyaki is a canvas upon which anything can happen. After making this once, I am clear that I will never need to refer to a recipe again because what ingredients contribute to the future one's will be guided only by what is in my heart and refrigerator. 

What is this dish like?  It is very indigenous to itself. Crispy fried and soft cabbage with green onion brings sweet flavors carried through with a batter that provides umami, umami, and more umami.

Topped with Japanese mayo, slightly sour, creamy, Okonomiyaki Sauce (umami A-bomb), fried garlic, and bonito flakes which dance around on the hot pancake while it is hot due to them being almost lighter than air.  

I would still love to attend this Saturday's class, but if I cannot, I will be okay.  The Okonomiyaki in my house is doing just fine.  I do have one reservation however, now that I have made this dish, I now feel the pressure to set my sites on the Wellington.

Pad Thai you can make at home!