I'm Standing Right Here!
I'm already wearing my two sexiest belts!
Emergency Induction Port
I highly recommend that you read Last Month’s Newsletter for the background on the situation with Tali. Life has been so stupidly hard for us over the last like, six or eight months. It has really been a rollercoaster, only instead of having hills that lead to drops, it’s just been the drops.
Right now the biggest problem on our radar is Tali. The pup is a mess. The good news is she is playful, spunky, and very loud at barking. Unfortunately, it does not seem like the rifampin has had much of an effect on her infection at all. Our vet was hoping it would be cleared up by the third week… we just started week five and at best it seems to have held steady. It’s a heck of a thing when your vet cries because she’s upset about your dog’s prognosis.
We are currently trying to find a dermatological vet specialist with an opening soon. A second opinion would be great to have, but so far they are all booking three to four months out. We are trying a supplemental antibiotic to see if it gives the rifampin a boost, but if that doesn’t work in the next two weeks, our treatment “option” is to basically discontinue treatment and make her as comfortable as possible.
I don’t want a skin infection to be the reason she dies. That just… seems so inconsequential and ridiculous. She is a vivacious, loving, and smart dog. She deserves so much more.
Can You Show Me Which Food Is Safe For Me To Eat?
I’ve had a lot of depressing newsletters lately. Life just keeps kicking us in the worst possible places at the worst possible times. So I thought I would expand upon one of my earliest bits of advice: how to travel without going anywhere. I had some good advice about searching out different restaurants and so on.
Lately I’ve been thinking about Japan. Getting to go there on work trips was such a bright spot. There is just no way I’d have been able to afford that on my own. But I miss the food quite a bit, and some things are just hard to find in America. One such thing? Good Onigiri. In Japan there was always a Lawson, 7-11, FamilyMart or other konbini with a stone’s throw where you could get a tasty, delightful ball of filled rice.
They aren’t exactly common or popular here. So I decided to make my own. I found an onigiri mold from Daiso (a Japanese dollar store that has started opening locations in America), and started planning.
Onigiri are stupid food. And I love stupid food. Stupid is not a pejorative here; it is high praise. Some food is complex and nuanced and delicious. Other food is simple, straightforward, but also delicious. Stupid food is found in that second category. Stupid food recipes are always short, with a few ingredients used to great effect.
A great example of this came up during the New Year’s party our friends host every year. It was a “simple thing” someone’s mom had thrown together when they were a kid. It was tortillas straight out of the package with shredded parmesan on top and dusted lightly with cayenne powder. That was then thrown in a 350 degree oven until the cheese crisped up.
It. Is. Stupid. Three things, right? But you know what else? That cheese and tortilla got a lovely texture, the heat from the cayenne cut through the unctuous nature of the parmesan, and pretty much everyone went back for seconds and more. Think back to every party or social event with food. People will rave about some fancy crudité that took all day to braise and create. And that is wonderful and special and perfect. But those same people will also rave about the simple snack that took three ingredients and five minutes to make.
So yeah, there is a definite place for stupid food. And it should be a lofty place. Food doesn’t need to be complicated to be amazing. Keep that in mind next time you are planning a dinner or party. Have one or two “centerpiece” foods that take time, effort, and careful planning to create. Go all out with those dishes and take well-deserved pride in them. But also make four or five stupid food dishes that take almost no time or planning. You’ll be happy, your guests will be happy… and if done right? Those stupid food dishes will make it look like you spent A LOT of time making food!
But back to the topic at hand. Onigiri! Onigiri is a great example of stupid food. At the most basic it is literally a ball of sticky rice. Technically it doesn’t even need fillings, toppings, or mixed in flavors!
One of the most popular flavors in Japan is the tuna mayo filling. And it’s pretty great, but I wanted something different. I came up with the idea of doing some sort of teriyaki pork. That evolved into what I’m calling Pineapple Teriyaki Pulled Pork. This filling is definitely a bit more complicated than a true stupid food. But I say it counts because it only has eight ingredients and really only needs like, fifteen minutes of actual work at the beginning, then three hours of waiting.
The recipe is at the end of this section.
I seared off the pork, threw in some onions, pineapple, and garlic, and then threw it in an oven for like three hours. Pulled pork style recipes are great, because really all you need to do is let it braise in the oven for hours while you do literally anything else. (Probably don’t sleep. Sleeping while cooking is considered by many to be bad form.)
For me, I spent those hours cleaning up the dishes and watching videos on how to form onigiri by hand. Think of onigiri as a sandwich. There are an endless number of “authentic” fillings, toppings, and mixed in flavors. You can find recipes for a lot of fish based fillings, but also fillings like sweet potatoes and honey, umeboshi, and more. The nori that wraps onigiri is optional too, but it does make handling the sticky rice easier.
Ultimately it was in the oven for just under three hours. This recipe is VERY forgiving. Before putting the pork in the oven, just make sure the level of the liquids is right around the top of your pork. Feel free to put in more, (or different), veggies, different sauces or spices, or whatever you feel like that day. It’ll be okay. Heck, you could even replace the pork with a nice chunk of beef and be successful.
I was missing Japanese style food. But do you miss Mexican? Indian? Cameroonian? Swap out the oils, veggies, pineapples, and teriyaki for something appropriate to the cuisine you want. You could make a killer Thai red curry pork, for example, by swapping the teriyaki sauce for coconut milk, dropping the toasted sesame oil, and losing the pineapples for… actually those would still work. Throw in some red curry paste, galangal, fish sauce, and some Thai bird chilis, and you’ve got the makings of a great meal.
Even if your recipe isn’t “authentic”, you can still borrow flavors from a cuisine you like and make something delicious. This is an easy and rewarding way to expand your horizons. If nothing else, make this a once-a-month meal. Pick a date, say, the 20th of every month. And each month, decide on a cuisine, and have your pulled pork/beef/chicken/tofu dinner on the 20th, with a twist on your ingredient choices.
And your starch can be different too! This basic recipe goes great with rice, naan, udon noodles, tortillas, spaghetti, pita, tostones, Wonderbread, kaiser rolls, and more. Heck, you can even omit the starch and put this on a bed of green papaya, Bibb lettuce, coleslaw, or anything you can imagine. Side dishes are never a bad idea either, though if you stick with a pork or other fatty/unctuous choice, you’ll want to aim for something fresh or acidic to help cut through that.
Without further ado, the recipe! All temperatures are in Fahrenheit and all measurements are in Imperial units because I’m American and we aren’t allowed to use common sense units. The actual size of the cans and bottles doesn’t really matter; just go for large ones!
Pineapple Teriyaki Pulled Pork
Ingredients:
~5 pounds of some pork butts (This can be one butt or several!)
2-3 Tbsp neutral high temp oil
1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
2-3 onions, cut into eighths wedges
8ish cloves of garlic, smashed
1 large can of crushed pineapples
1 bottle of teriyaki sauce (kikkoman takumi sauce)
Green onions for topping
Taken for granted:
Salt and Pepper
(If making onigiri, make a bunch of sushi rice and buy some sheets of nori)
Procedure:
Preheat an oven, hopefully your own, to 400 degrees. Put the oils into a large Dutch oven and set it to the highest heat your stovetop can manage. I used a portable induction burner at 525 degrees. Salt and pepper the butts, coating them all over. You are seasoning for a bunch of meat, so if it looks like what happens when ice cream tragically falls into sand on a beach, you’re good.
When the oil is ripping hot, (carefully fling a single drop of water into the oil to see if it sputters, pops, and causes mild panic), start searing each side of the butts, which will take 2 to 3 minutes a side. Once each side is brown and delicious, throw in the onions. Let them cook for a couple of minutes, allowing them to get a touch of brown around the edges. Once they start to get a bit of color, lift up the butts so the onions fall beneath them. The onions will become a delicious floor for meat.
Immediately open and toss in the can of pineapples, juice and all. Since the oil is going to be like 525 degrees it should start to simmer or boil relatively soon. When you see those magical bubbles, dump the bottle of teriyaki sauce in. I like to put a splash of water into the bottle, swirl it around, and put that in too. That shouldn’t take terribly long to start to simmer, and once it does let it do it’s thing for five minutes.
After five minutes you’re probably bored of waiting, so throw the smashed garlic in. You can make yourself feel “chef-y” by stirring everything around the butts at this point, but honestly it is unnecessary. Let the butts be the star.
Now you can throw the lid over the Dutch oven, and throw it into the real oven. You should find something else to do for about an hour. Maybe watch a couple episodes of Frieren. After the hour is up, turn the oven down to 350, and then let it cook unbothered for another two or three episodes.
At this point it should have been cooking in total for about two hours or so. Pull the Dutch oven out of the real oven. Take the lid off, and marvel at the amazing smell that has been created. Check pork with a fork to see if it is tender. Quite literally you just poke it with a fork, maybe twist a little bit. If the pork flakes away and looks delicious, you are in a good spot. If your fork flakes away, you need better utensils.
Depending on how much liquid you used, or how many pounds of butts you added, or if there were extra onions, you may need to use some tongs to flip the butts upside down. I chose to do this, for example, because there was about a quarter inch of exposed pork that I wanted to soak in the juices. Put the Dutch oven back in the real oven for another hour or so. You can keep the lid off, or even just slightly askew to reduce the sauce and create delicious crispy bits of pork on top.
You are now three hours into this cook, and if you have a stomach or a soul you are probably getting pretty hungry because things smell too damn delicious. The good news is you are done! Take the Dutch oven out of the real oven, and marvel at the food. You can shred the pork with forks, tongs, or even bare hands if you are some kind of mutant that can’t be burned.
This is when we stupidly started making the rice. If you aren’t us, you could make the rice sometime during that last hour of cooking so you don’t have to wait.
The actual dinner we had was a simple bed of rice, with a lot of the pulled pork on top, followed by a ton of green onions and shredded nori.
To make this into onigiri, watch some videos on YouTube. I tried hand-forming one, but it definitely takes practice. A mold makes things easy, as the trick seems to be compressing the rice. But hand-forming basically has you putting down a sheet of cling wrap, sprinkling the wrap with salt, then putting ~150g of sticky rice on the salt. (Yes, this is in metric units because I watched some excellent Japanese how-to videos.)
You then make a divot in the middle, put in your filling, then use the wrap to ball the rice up and form into a triangle. Mine fell apart soon after unwrapping, which was embarrassing even though it was delicious. The ones we used the mold to make were perfect though!
So please, give this recipe, or your own version of it, a try! Post in the comments with your results.
Well, That’s Certainly One Way To Do It. - SPSFC5
I am a team lead of one of the judging teams for the fifth year of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. This is a year long competition of indie science fiction books, intended to highlight authors and works which otherwise get ignored. At this point we are in the first phase, where each team reads 30 books to narrow down to two. Each team then reads the top two of the other teams, and we keep narrowing them down to a winner.
Due to Tali and human sicknesses, things in February got pushed back for me. So our first cuts will happen sometime shortly after this post goes out. I still don’t personally have a clear favorite yet, but I have a few that are solid contenders. Still, this extra time has been great for making sure each book in our bracket has had multiple judges reading them.
If you haven’t checked them out yet, please visit my fellow judges at the links below!
R.E. Holding
Jimiflan
Jimi’s Wordpress
Jimi’s BlueSky
Ida
Champ
Goals Update:
Honestly this year has been rougher than I wanted so far. I still want to release Pallas Chase before the end of 2026. This may get pushed back based on Tali and other problems that are happening.
Thank you so much for following and reading! Don’t forget to subscribe, like and comment. Let me know what you want to see more of from this newsletter! Engagement is crucial. I look forward to posting throughout the rest of 2026!