The miso came off the spoon in a slow ribbon, and the smell when it hit the butter was nutty and salt-sweet, almost like roasted peanuts before it shifted into something deeper and older.
I'd picked up half a kabocha at the Tanaka stall on Saturday — they'd had three left, all dark-skinned and heavy for their size. I took the smallest one and let it sit on the counter until this morning. November kabocha has a dryness to the flesh that summer squash doesn't. It holds its shape when you cook it and turns almost chestnut-sweet toward the edges.
The glaze was white miso thinned with sake and a little mirin, finished with cold butter off the heat. What I hadn't accounted for was the left side of the burner running ahead again. The pan tilted that direction, and two wedges took on more colour than I'd planned — a dark mahogany band along one edge, bitter at the very tip. I ate those first. The bitterness against the kabocha's sweetness was not a bad accident. My grandmother would have called it yakimono no hana — the flower of the char — which I think she invented to make me feel better about burned edges, but I've come to believe her.