PORTLAND — I am on item No. 4 of my culinary bucket list, and I have begun to think this list is a bad idea. This is not good news, as I have eight items to go before the end of the year.

At the beginning of 2025, I created my list, 12 items I’ve long wanted to cook (I’m talking years) that I intended to actually get to — finally. I aimed to cook one item a month and check it off my list. So far, I’ve made stuffed cabbage, fresh pasta, home-made pop tarts and, in mid-June onigiri, a portable, triangular-shaped Japanese snack that consists of rice, seaweed and a single bite-sized filling, often something pickled. (After I wrote this, I tackled item No. 5, goat’s milk caramel.)

Onigiri is probably the longest-standing item on my list. I loved them, and practically lived on them, when I lived in Tokyo for two years more than 35 years ago. Although you can find onigiri pretty easily in the U.S. now, when I returned to the states from Japan, that wasn’t the case. Back then, unless you lived in New York or L.A. or some other big, diverse city — and even then only in certain neighborhoods — America was an onigiri desert. I wanted to make onigiri, because I really missed eating them.

But somehow, decades passed and I never tried, not even once.

It has slowly dawned on me, though, that checking 12 items off a list after I’ve made them once vs. actually learning to cook said items are not the same thing. Not even close. Had I instead put a culinary adventure on my list, say, make mole in Mexico, given time and money I could have accomplished it. Had I listed just one or two items, say, learn to make a perfect loaf of sourdough bread, perhaps I’d have edged closer to mastery in the year that I’ve allotted myself.

I’ve come to see that what I really want is to be able to efficiently, confidently and neatly stuff cabbage, roll out pop tart dough, breezily make myself a dinner of homemade tagliatelle with asparagus and peas (maybe even on a weeknight), shape cute little onigiri for a picnic or an afternoon snack — plus those eight other pending items. Efficiently, confidently, neatly, there’s the rub. Mastery, everyone knows, requires practice.

This was forcefully brought home to me as I stood in the busy kitchen of Norimoto Bakery in Portland one afternoon learning how to make onigiri from the bakery’s owner, the talented and encouraging Atsuko Fujimoto.

Fujimoto eats onigiri pretty much every day of the week. She said it is the first thing many children in Japan learn to cook. (Do we have an equivalent? Brownies? Chocolate chip cookies? Boxed mac and cheese?) Her own daughter makes them every day to bring to school. Norimoto also sells them; on a busy Saturday, as many as 80 onigiri go out the bakery door.

When I got to the bakery, the white sushi-style rice had already been made and was keeping warm in a rice cooker. Fujimoto had already cut the square nori seaweed sheets into three neat strips apiece; each individual onigiri she makes uses one strip. She had also prepared several fillings: a traditional pickled plum (umeboshi), highly soy-seasoned scrambled eggs, and salmon. All I really had to do was assemble.

Which turned out to be harder than I expected.

“I was never very good at geometry,” I joked feebly, as I tried to press an onigiri into a neat triangle shape; “nigiru,” the verb that forms part of “onigiri,” means to grasp or squeeze in Japanese. My specimens came out lumpy and homely. “Round is fine, too,” kindly Atsuko said. A memory from my life in Japan came faintly to mind: I was wrapping a present, but the corners were a mess, the tape askew, the bow crooked and untidy. Present-giving, including proper presentation, is high art in Japan. A Japanese (male) friend watching me struggle observed that I wasn’t marriage material if I couldn’t wrap a present properly. Now, decades later, I could add onigiri inadequacy to my lengthening list of flaws.

Luckily, Atsuko had a workaround: An onigiri mold. It’s made from plastic, though she has a bamboo one, too, and it has several onigiri-sized triangle cutouts. “This is definitely different from how you would make it at home,” she said. But commercial establishments, Norimoto included, use molds because they can produce onigiri much faster than by hand and, in my case, neater, as well. Using the molds, Atsuko can make 15 onigiri in the 10 minutes she waits for her shokupan (milk bread) dough to rest before she adds salt to the dough. Following her instructions, I filled a triangle cutout with about 1/3 cup rice, positioned the filling over the rice, topped the filling with more rice, pressed everything together and pushed a recognizable triangle out of the mold!

Here are a few important tips from my onigiri-making lesson, should you want to give it a try yourself:

• The rice should be warm, so that it sticks together when you form the onigiri.

• The filling should be highly seasoned — salty or pickled — to offset the blandness of the rice.

• Your hands should be wet and lightly salted when you shape the onigiri, in order to season the snack and to keep the rice from sticking to your hands.

• For extra flavor, sprinkle the rice with furikake (a Japanese seasoning made from sesame seeds, seaweed, dried fish and other ingredients) before you enfold it in the nori.

• There is a right side and a wrong side to nori! Who knew? When you wrap your onigiri, the shinier side should face out.

But my favorite thing? Admittedly not strictly a practical tip. There was no way I was leaving Norimoto late that morning — or any morning — without one of Atsuko’s stupendous, Beard award–winning pastries. It wasn’t easy, but I finally settled on a frangipane-rhubarb tart. The rhubarb, by the way, comes from Atsuko’s own garden. Now I’ve got something healthy, I said to Atsuko, meaning the onigiri, and something unhealthy, I said, motioning toward the pastry.

Atsuko laughed. “A balanced meal!” she said.

ONIGIRI

This recipe comes from “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art” by Shizuo Tsuji. I was delighted to open up this classic cookbook and read in the recipe note, “…to make good rice ‘balls’ takes practice.” Atsuko Fujimoto also suggests dill pickles with tuna salad as a filling for onigiri.

Yield: 8-10 onigiri

5 cups hot, cooked short-grain rice

4 sheets dried nori

FILLINGS:

Dried bonito flakes moistened in soy sauce

Salted grilled salmon

Pickled plums (umeboshi)

2 tablespoons black sesame seeds, toasted

Toast the nori sheets by passing them over a flame and cut sheets cross-wise into 1-inch widths.

Prepare the fillings you desire.

To form the triangles, when handling the hot rice, keep your hands moistened with salty water to season the rice slightly and to keep it from sticking to your hands.

Place a handful of rice (about 1/2 cup) across the bent fingers of the left hand. Make an indentation in the rice and tuck in one of the fillings — about 1 teaspoon of bonito flakes, a few flakes of salmon or a whole pickled plum. (Atsuko and I bonded over our preference for more filling than is standard because we like to get a taste of rice, nori and filling in each bite.) Use your index finger, middle finger and thumb to mold the triangle shape about 2 ½ inches high and 1 inch thick. Continue molding to cover the fillings. The main thing is not to make the rice too salty and to avoid packing it too hard or too loosely.

Set the onigiri down on their bases and cover each with a strip of nori seaweed, shiny side out, like the roof of a cottage. (Fujimoto uses larger strips of nori for more coverage.) Sprinkle sesame seeds on the rice that is exposed.

Eat with fingers, of course.