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12150a7
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Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?
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kids
fiction
fantasy
bathtub
silly
hearing
sound
octopus
nonsense
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Norton Juster |
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43f3718
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In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?
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octopi
slothrop
octopus
mental-health
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Thomas Pynchon |
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627429c
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Had a person attempted to taste me so soon after we met, I would have been alarmed; but since Athena was an octopus, I was thrilled. Although we couldn't have been more different -- I, a terrestrial vertebrate constrained by joints and bound to air; she, a marine mollusk with not a single bone, who breathed water -- she was clearly as curious about me as I was about her.
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mollusks
octopus
taste
curiosity
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Sy Montgomery |
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6b3fb7e
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exaggeration is the octopus of the English language
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octopus
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Matthew Pearl |
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3d9de0b
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But always, at moments when his mind was like a blind octopus, squirming in an agony of knife-cuts, she would drop in that accusation.
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mind
no-more-parades
parade-s-end
octopus
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Ford Madox Ford |
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ae69b1b
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Go out the north exit of Nakano Station and into the Sun Mall shopping arcade. After a few steps, you'll see Gindaco, the (octopus balls) chain. Turn right into Pretty Good #1 Alley. Walk past the deli that specializes in (steamed sticky rice with tasty bits), a couple of ramen shops, and a fugu restaurant. Go past the pachinko parlor, the grilled eel stand, the camera shops, and the stairs leading to Ginza Renoir coffee shop. If you see the bicycle parking lot in front of Life Supermarket, you're going the right way. During the two-block walk through a typical neighborhood, you've passed more good food than in most midsized Western cities, even if you don't love octopus balls as much as I do. Welcome to Tokyo. Tokyo is unreal. It's the amped-up, neon-spewing cyber-city of literature and film. It's an alley teeming with fragrant grilled chicken shops. It's children playing safely in the street and riding the train across town with no parents in sight. It's a doughnut chain with higher standards of customer service than most high-end restaurants in America. A colossal megacity devoid of crime, grime, and bad food? Sounds more like a utopian novel than an earthly metropolis.
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takoyaki
tokyo
octopus
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Matthew Amster-Burton |
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c41d083
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When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it's an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi, ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco's purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it's nearly full. Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you'd use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two. The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven't gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful.
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grill
japanese-cooking
skewer
takoyaki
tokyo
octopus
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Matthew Amster-Burton |
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15c9ad2
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Takoyaki are octopus balls- not, thankfully, in the anatomical sense. They're a spherical cake with a chunk of boiled octopus in the center, cooked on a special griddle with hemispherical indentations. If you're familiar with the Danish pancakes called , you know what a takoyaki looks like; the pan is also similar. Takoyaki are not unknown in the U.S., but I've only ever seen them made fresh at cultural festivals. Iris is a big fan, but I've always been more into the takoyaki aesthetic than the actual food. Takoyaki are always served in a paper or wooden boat and usually topped with mayonnaise, bonito flakes, shredded nori, and takoyaki sauce.
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japanese-cuisine
street-food
toppings
takoyaki
japanese-food
octopus
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Matthew Amster-Burton |