Waking up flowers

The dough dozed, ready to be stretched and rolled into hua juan, or flower rolls. My grandmother’s nails clinked against the metal bowl as her fingers hugged up the sticky white mound.

Plumes of flour dusted the air as she pounded the mound into the wooden pastry board. Her rough, veined hands smoothed the dough into a bright lump, like a newborn baby cradled in leather. The rolling pin rumbled as my grandmother’s skinny arms brewed a storm of wood against wood, flattening out the dough into a soft sheet.

Unlike my mother, who sneezed at the sight of flour, my grandmother pushed on with silent satisfaction. Her slippers shuffled in and out of the pantry, and she held a careful grip on the bottle of oil. Clear gold pooled onto the dough, and my grandmother folded the corners in and out to give each edge a chance to dip in, until the entire sheet shined. She rubbed in ground spices and she sighed to breathe in their scent.

The light dimmed outside, sharpening my grandmother’s uneven silhouette in the doorway. I don’t know why she needed such a huge knife to cut through such a thin layer of dough, but eventually the sheet separated out into strips.

Outside the rain prevented my grandmother from tending her green onions and chives, but in the kitchen, she could always grow a different sort of garden. One by one, each spongy white ribbon that striped across the board was folded into snug flowers. They bloomed with spices instead of pollen and their oily surfaces gleamed.

My grandmother turned on the stove and tucked the flower rolls into a metal tower. They fell back to sleep in a bed of steam.

Making sushi

My mother and I were on a roll, pun absolutely intended.

To say we were making sushi would be an insult to seafood. Our finished rolls puffed out near their middles like eels ready to give birth. We struggled to chop them without exploding them, as flakes of dried seaweed peppered our fingers and vinegar tickled our noses.

We'd guessed that the gist of sushi-making involved stuffing various edible objects into seaweed and rice and slicing it all up into colorful, oceanic hockey pucks. Hunger and impatience prevented us from bothering to eHow or wikiHow anything. Eggs? Yes we liked them, roll 'em in. Shrimp? Yup, yup. Avocado? Pan-Asian restaurants had it in theirs, so why not?

I couldn't call us complete amateurs. We had some previous experience rolling up food, such as when we regularly made spring rolls on lazy Saturday afternoons. I'd loved the silkiness of their wrappers while they billowed in warm water.

On the other hand with sushi, my fingers stuck to everything. I left behind grains of rice and specks of seaweed everywhere I touched, like post-it reminders of the giant clean up we'd have to do after lunch.

"That's the last one," my mother said, leaning in to pluck each slice off the cutting board. She beamed with pride. Our sushi didn't unravel, and the rainbow platters we spread them out on complemented their veggie insides.

"Wait." I pulled out my phone. "I've got to take a picture."

My mother then proceeded to spend the next ten minutes carefully inching the platters this way and that, because if it wasn't perfect, it wasn't worth memorializing.

"It's fine," I said, clenching my teeth and my growling stomach.

"Alright, alright." My mother wiped her hands on her apron and stepped back as I snapped the photo. I showed it to her, and she nodded in approval. "Very good. Now, eat."