The Alchemist

The other night, nobody in our house felt like going shopping. It was dark and rainy, we were all dog-tired, and what with the speedometer of our car taking a holiday -- quite apart from the weird clunking noise the car has started to make -- no one felt like hiking twenty minutes down the hill, then back, just to do some shopping for dinner.

In the refrigerator we had some old mashed potatoes, five slices of stale lunch meat, leftover spaghetti, a jar of pesto with about a tablespoon of contents left, and maybe one third of a pint of sour milk. In the cupboards were a few withered onions, a green pepper that could never have been eaten raw given its state, and some cooking apples. My husband took one look at this and threw up his hands. My kids took one look at this and almost threw up. And me? I can't say I felt inspired, but I remembered a night some years back when I still lived in Northern Japan.

It was February, and it had been snowing heavily. Two friends were over, Wendy from Canada and Li from China, and we were sitting at the kotatsu, a low table with a heating element underneath, covered with a blanket. There is nothing cozier than a kotatsu, and though all of us were hungry, none of us felt like going out in the snow to shop for dinner. Plus, it was late.

"I'll cook," said Li, getting up.

Wendy and I, knowing what was in -- or not in -- my cupboards, couldn't help laughing. Li, a nuclear engineering student, was a fabulous cook, but in my refrigerator were three utterly disgusting spring onions, a little milk, and nothing else. In my cupboards were cooking oil, salt, sesame oil, and flour. Even an alchemist has to start with something; you might be able to conjure gold from lead, but who could make it from dust?

Actually, Li probably could. He went into my kitchen and started nosing around. "You've got flour!" he cried happily. Wendy and I looked at each other. So I had flour? So what?

"And salt!" he called over his shoulder. We shrugged and went back to our conversation.

"And onions, and a couple of cloves of garlic!"

I was amazed: I'd forgotten all about that garlic. I'm not sure if I hadn't actually thrown it away.

We heard Li lighting my two-burner stove, heard him chopping something -- oh God, no, not the onions! -- followed by the sounds of something being whisked. And then, a few minutes later, we could smell something that made our stomachs rumble.

"Have you got tea?" Li called out.

"Yes -- Jasmine and Assam. Top cupboard on the left, behind the jar of ten-yen coins."

"Got it."

Wendy and I, being of little faith, had resigned ourselves to no dinner, when Li came back bearing a steaming plate of thin, light golden pancakes and a pot of jasmine tea. Each pancake was as light and airy as puff pastry, and deliciously savory. Some were onion flavored, some were garlic, and the rest were glazed with sesame oil. I've eaten some good meals in my time, but I still remember those pancakes with awe and longing. I lost track of Li after I left Sendai, but I have never forgotten him -- or whoever he eventually married. Lucky, lucky, lucky Mrs Li: my kitchen was cleaner when he was finished with it than it had been to begin with.

So the other night, I did a Li. I sauteed the onion and pepper, mixed it into the leftover spaghetti, and tossed the whole thing together with chopped up lunch meat. The sour milk and mashed potatoes got made into savory pancakes with the pesto, so we even had an appetizer. The cooking apples got baked with cinnamon, so we would have had dessert, but my kids refused to eat them because they weren't sweet enough. Still I didn't throw them away: they went into applesauce the next day.

But that's another story.