Oh, boy, it's been a while.

During my absence, I found a new hobby--one that's not entirely unrelated to my love of good food. Since mid September, I've been taking a weekly class of pottery making, at a local studio. It was as much a result of boredom as that of frustration. I'd wanted more Japanese-style bowls and plates for my food (and for my food porn), but not too surprisingly, good ones are exceedingly rare in Chicago. Especially after the much-lamented closure of the Japanese ceramic shop in Mitsuwa, finding up-to-date ceramics at a reasonable price have been pretty much impossible. So, I thought, why don't I try making them myself? To begin with, we could use some ramen bowls.

Of course, it didn't go as planned. What I discovered during my first few days at the pottery studio was that it wasn't me who determined the shape of the finished product; it seemed that the clay itself decided to take one shape, and once it knew what it wanted to be, there was no way I could force it to become anything else. I cranked out a lot of lopsided, thick-walled bowls of varying sizes, in addition to quite a few outright dead ones (which, thankfully, could be recycled). Ramen bowls were at least a few months away, I decided, with a bit of amusement. And I meekly obeyed the commands of the wild, assertive lumps of clay on my throwing wheel.

The first trick I learned, therefore, was to "let live." Since most of my bowls came out uneven, I soon realized that I need to take their lopsidedness and turn it into something interesting, if I didn't want to start all over again. When one part of the wall had significantly more clay than the rest, I pinched the thick part to make a pour spout; when my finger got caught on the rim of a small dish, I squished the rim even more to give it an artsy flair. That sort of thing.

After a month and a half, I'm surprised to see how much progress I've made. Not that I'm a great potter by any stretch of imagination, but my bowls turn out much more even and they do listen to my commands more. It's not just the clay becoming whatever it wants to be, but now I can, at least sometimes, guide it to take more or less the shape I have in my head. And most of all, it's been such a fun.

Oh, and I've managed to make a few bowls that I can actually use on the dinner table, too. This shallow bowl with Tenmoku glaze is one of them:

Daikon Sprouts, Jamaican Pepper and Chicken Salad for two

• 1/2 pack daikon sprouts (available at Korean and Japanese markets)
• 1 Jamaican chocolate pepper, cut into thin strips
• a handful of grilled or steamed chicken breast, shredded
• 1/2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1/2 tablespoon vingar
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1/2 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds
• a drizzle of sesame oil

Instruction would be just a line: toss all the ingredients together and serve. Daikon sprouts ("kaiware" in Japanese) have a very refreshing flavor akin to that of the shredded daikon you find next to your sashimi. Don't forget to rinse them thoroughly, though--there was a huge outbreak of E-Coli in Japan, blamed on daikon sprouts about a decade ago. This incident, much like the recent contaminated spinach incident here, drove all the daikon sprouts off the supermarket shelves. It took years for the supermarkets to muster the courage to carry them again, and those were sad years--I love the wasabi-like, refreshing flavor of the daikon sprouts. The slight bitterness of the pepper is quite nice, though not absolutely necessary, in this salad.