The Rice Was Both Things at Once

August, and I have been sitting in this apartment trying to figure out what to do with myself. Not in a bad way, just in the way where summer gets very quiet and you start eyeing the pantry like it owes you something. Last week I bought a bamboo rolling mat on a whim. It was four dollars. I had no plan.

I looked up a sushi tutorial online and watched it twice, which made me feel very prepared. I was not prepared. The rice instructions alone took me twenty minutes to execute incorrectly. The thing about sushi rice is that it requires a very specific texture, and what I produced was something between porridge and gravel, simultaneously, which I genuinely did not know was possible. I stood at the counter and stared at it for a while. Then I put nori on the mat and pressed the rice onto it anyway, because I had already committed.

the roll is not going well and she knows it

The rolling part went about as well as the rice part. The first one fell apart immediately. The second one held together but was about twice as thick as it was supposed to be, I had been too generous with the cucumber. The third one looked almost normal, which felt like a triumph. I put all three on a plate and took a picture of them, because I needed evidence that this happened, and because they were kind of beautiful in a very sad way.

presenting: my masterpiece

I ate every single one of them standing at the counter, with soy sauce from a tiny bottle that had been in my cabinet for probably a year. They tasted fine, actually. Not good, but fine. I think I'll try again next week, maybe with less rice. Maybe the same amount. I haven't decided yet. Gerald put out another leaf, which felt like either encouragement or commentary; I'm not sure which.