After a delightful New Year’s day dinner of orzo with white truffle followed by southern fried chicken and roasted kabocha, leeks, and Brussels sprouts, with fresh baked banana bread and Toscanini’s Belgian chocolate ice cream, it was time for bed.

The day was productive.  I am up to page 226 in my book about family life, which leaves two final sections.

What better place than Japan to finish the work?

Soon I’ll be in the air and en route.

Yakitori with Shinji, lunch with Takeshi, a train to Jiro’s family in Kaga Onsen.

The interviews for pieces on Japanese cheese production and micro-brewed beer are on the books, meetings for NOMA will take place soon.

This is what’s in the cards for the book, and it’s from a French writer named Delphine de Vigan, referring to a character of a mother: “I don’t know when I gave in; perhaps the day I realized how much writing, my writing, was linked to her, to her fictions, those moments of madness in which her life had become so burdensome that she had to escape it, moments in which her pain could only find expression in stories.”