my mom, in between taking me to assorted rock concerts as a kid, also taught me how to sew, knit, and crochet. sometimes she combined the two: i came home from a Rush concert once and drew her a picture of the black/white seersucker jacket Geddy Lee had worn, and she made me one. kick ass.
in college i started knitting sweaters, but knitting while attending lectures led to miscounts on rows so my sleeves tended to be really, really long.
when skinny scarves came into fashion and were selling for $40 a pop, i turned up my nose and went to the knitting store, only to hand over $200 for crazy fun yarns.
one year over the holidays in New Mexico we scored a huge ream of black fleece on sale so we made backpacking pillows, neck warmers and hats. tons of hats. tall hats, bishop’s hats, arty hats. everyone got a hat that year. my brother, who had slept during the entire hat making enterprise after eating too much for dinner the night before (oh, the days of La Tertulia) woke up and said “i want to design one.” he disappeared for about an hour, then came back and said “imagine a ball made out of 8 equal triangles, can you make a hat just like that, only the 8th piece would be my head?” when we finished there was only one word for it: genius.

i’m glad to say i don’t have the “craft bug” or any other hipster ailment concerning making things, but every now and then i see something and i say “Oooh. i gotta make me one of those.” my enthusiasm for making something drops drastically if i have to go to the store and buy something so i’m a big fan of using what i’ve already squirreled away in my (kind of large) cool-shit-i’ll-maybe-use-in-a-few-years box. i will admit that despite my best intentions i usually end up with things that are ridiculously, shamefully cute, but i think that’s somehow related to not wanting to go to the store, like i am forever dipping into the same stash of über cute raw materials.

so, a couple days ago a friend sent me a link to this bit of insanity:

yay! now i can make things out of my cat that my cat can play with. perverted, but really cool. the only problem was i had to start building up my collection of cat hair. this is what i got from this morning, clearly with some help from the pups:

and this is what BB thinks about getting brushed more:

so, intent on procrastination, i decided to make a fleece sack for my phone! after a long debate over whether to protect the glass with the plastic sticker or carry around an ugly case, i settled on making my own.

it’s a moon on there, though i could easily have made it a fried egg. which got me thinking. maybe i should concentrate on making crafts that illustrate old titles for my novel. it’s a good way to procrastinate. so this one’s for “Moonquake.” the next one’s going to be for “Drink with Clarity More,” though that’s not much of a craft project, more like a lifestyle.

“In the winter the coyotes hunt in packs, but they all know to walk in the same exact footprints to give the impression there’s only one animal, ever, featured in profile on the cover of Après Magazine, its obsidian eye trained on the moon.”

while the garden and backyard was being dismantled i went to Lisbon for two weeks to attend the Disquiet: Dzanc Books Literary Program and solve the mystery regarding certain Asian pastries and why they don’t seem very Asian once you stop cooing over how delicious they are and think about them in relation to their fellow brethren (like fried milk, red bean paste, sesame rice dumplings, etc).

i thought i was onto something when i found out the wine my parents used to serve (before i had a say on the matter) on fancy occasions (Lancers and Mateus) were both from Portugal. hm… i thought, was it something that filtered into their consciousness via Portuguese influence over Macao and Hong Kong? i asked my father, and he said “I know Mateus is made in Portugal, it is the info I got from recommendation from some magazine long ago. Lancers was introduced by some friend.” not that he answered the question, but that’s Dad for you.

so, the great pastry tale starts in Portugal in the Age of Discovery: in 1498 Vasco De Gama found the route from Portugal around Africa to India, allowing the Portuguese to dominate the spice trade, colonize Macau and various other spots along the way, and bring pastries to China. thank you!

i have always wondered why the egg tart served in Chinese dim sum was such an anomaly. it’s baked, for one thing, it’s a custard, which is weird for the Chinese, and it’s a tart, even weirder. now that i have gone to Belem (the old home of Pastel de Nata) i’d have to say the Chinese should have followed the recipe better. more creamy, less egg-y, and with the dusting of powdered sugar and cinnamon the thing goes “poof” when you bite into it.
visiting the old home of a special food is a great thing. in Belem when you order the custard tarts they ask “how many.” maybe the little guys operate on the buddy system, or maybe this was influenced by the Chinese. In Nanxiang, China, when we ordered soup dumplings they asked how many steamer baskets. makes you want to learn the numbers of foreign languages real fast.

one morning i dropped by my favorite cafe and ordered a coffee (by the way, their espressos are ok, not great, but ok) and the largest pastry i could see. i took one bite and almost peed my pants. whatever it was called in Portuguese i don’t remember, but what i was eating was the famous Hong Kong pastry called the Gai Mai Bao, or the Chicken Tail Bun. Buttery and coconutty and open faced, it’s always been my mom’s favorite, even though what she knows is an eclair-shaped pastry with the buttery goods stuffed inside. Same difference really.

finally i went to Castella do Paulo, a Japanese/Portuguese bakery where i found out that a famous dessert called Pão-de-Ló was taken to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the 1500′s, and the Japanese in classic form morphed the recipe, perfected it and renamed it Castella cake. And how. here’s a video of their “and how.” (They’ve got this thing about beating it by hand in gorgeous copper pots. Please play the sound full volume.)

also in Belem is the port from where all the Discoverers set sail. pretty amazing to think Vasco De Gama looked at this same view as he took off. minus the bridge, of course, which, incidentally, was built by the same people who designed San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. I know I know, looks like the other one…

nowadays Lisbon is so lovely and beautiful i can’t believe anyone would want to leave. the drinks all come Pantone coordinated and all the plants look like Los Angeles. and that bridge? really…

Jacques Pepin has a great show on television called Fast Food My Way, where he prepares a three course dinner in a hour, from start to finish. the details are lovely to watch, if you’re not too busy drooling: the way he slices an onion, or spreads jam on poundcake. one of my favorite things is whenever he uses eggs or chickens, he talks about how if he were on a deserted island he would be perfectly happy if there were nothing on the entire island but eggs. but then his sentence always seems to drag on, and he adds to that island a few chickens, a bottle of wine, some fresh peas…a couple of sausages… but really…just a couple of eggs…

a month ago the folks at Chamber Four started a series called Desert Isle Books, where writers were asked to discuss the one book they would bring with them to a deserted island. they didn’t make any restrictions on food, so i figured i’d get to bring my one book, plus all the eggs, chickens and bottles of wine i wanted.

here’s the piece i wrote, and happy cooking.

having spent many years on this best coast, one thing i thought i missed from the east coast were these swirly things that came down from the trees every fall. the few that i found in northern california didn’t have the nose adhesive that i remembered from my childhood.
but, two weeks ago at the amazingly fun Tin House Workshop, i discovered that Portland is full of these things. ah!!

Portland is home to many other great things, including a barista that offered me the extra shot of espresso that he was “going to throw out anyway,” my buddy Too Much Coffee Man, the literary duck that came and sat at your feet as you read into the sunset, and a donation-based service that pays for your taxi home if you’re too cocktail-ed out to do otherwise.

if you don’t read my story then it’s just plain funny.

i’ve been noodling about the idea of whether or not to start a Tumblr account. if i could only figure out when i’m serious and when i’m a jackass i could probably separate my blogging from my tumbling but until then…
the thing i like about blogging is that i actually “own” it. it’s mine, all mine. what that means and why that matters is a small, personal thing, the sort of small, personal thing like bringing your favorite jacket to the beach. you get there and it’s so blazingly hot you want very much to ditch the thing, like it’s no longer your favorite anymore and no one else in their right mind has anything thicker than lycra on. it’s thick and heavy and super annoying and the crook of your elbow where it’s tucked is sweating something fierce. on top of that Unified Desires and all these other corporations keep tossing toys in your direction, genuinely interesting toys requiring both hands to be free in order to catch them. what to do?

meanwhile, the wonderful folks at Witness have posted the cover of their next issue of which i am a contributor! The story they published is called “Eupcaccia,” named after a fecal-eating bug from Kobo Abe’s The Ark Sakura. It’s an excerpt from my novel called “A Drink With Clarity More” and is about dear old Malchicken Chicken. They’ve also posted the entire thing online.

|| Update ||
The wonderful folks at Chamber Four are going to put my story “Eupcaccia” in their fiction anthology. GO MALCHICKEN!