“monday” sounds unseasonably early for leisurely lunches with julian at burlamacco, indecent even, but when the first day of my fall break coincides with his fallow week between employment (he is joining another lab as research scientist, this time with tenure possibilities) we are swift, as my old school song exhorts, to seize what fortune sends. the lunch was excellent (burlamacco, it turns out, is one of justin’s usual watering holes — he took julian there for his birthday this year.) and when we left the subject of polenta was weighing heavily on own minds. “that was so amazing i will be dreaming of it tonight,” declares julian, who had his with his braised five-spice duck leg, but being somewhat more practical and associative in train-of-thought i nipped off to cold storage and bought chickpea flour, thinking of the panisse i had at tilleul citron in seillans. (to my eye-popping surprise, the plaza singapura cold storage had bags and bags of grains and flours of a wide range, or if not wide to real cooks certainly wider than my limited kitchen abilities would stretch to.) google gave me recipes galore, and i wonder, in the usual poultry-counting before incubated eggs fashion, what kind of sauce can i make for it if i did not want a western-style sauce. perhaps something sweetish-salty, perhaps mirin and ginger and soy sauce based, something slightly syrupy that was extremely like a chinese glaze, and with, maybe, lots and lots of sesame see? (at this point, my imagination started running also to dimsum style fried yam cakes and carrot cakes.) it remains only to state that the results were modest but delicious (it is afterall very easy to please when an indifferent and unskilled fumbler is cooking for oneself) and no sauce was necessary for swift and rapturous consumption; and to ask cooking types and the internet at large: why does chickpea flour clump so, for clumping is undoubtedly what it most excels at?