These four were part of a batch that hung for nearly a day. Three of them — Indonesian, Bagel Shop, Scandinavian — got stuck in the deep-research polling loop, waiting on Gemini / OpenAI tasks that never returned a "completed" state. Sicilian-American got further along but stalled mid-PDF render on a Chromium hang. After the daemon was killed and re-launched they all completed on the next attempt — a sign that the underlying generation work was fine; the daemon just doesn't yet have a per-step watchdog to kill a hung child and move on.
New / refreshed books
Cook Bagel Shop Food at Home
The neighborhood bagel shop in book form — the everything-bagel science, the lox & cream cheese geometry, a proper New York–style boiled-then-baked dough, the deli-counter salads (whitefish, tuna, egg), the cold brew that's just better at the bagel place, the sesame and poppy and onion that sits in jars next to the toaster. 42 recipes across 5 chapters. At Home Series #9.
Cook Indonesian in America
Indonesian home cooking translated for an American kitchen — nasi goreng (the proper way, with kecap manis), gado-gado, rendang from a regular stovetop, sate, soto ayam, sambals you can actually source the ingredients for, krupuk for the side of the plate, pisang goreng for dessert. The cooking of an archipelago of 17,000 islands, distilled to what works in a US kitchen with a US pantry. 53 recipes across 7 chapters.
Cook Scandinavian in America
Scandinavian home cooking on an American weeknight — kjøttkaker (Norwegian meatballs), fårikål, gravlax without the smoker, dilled new potatoes, smörgåstårta for a brunch, kanelbullar on a Saturday morning, kjøttsuppe from a pot, the open-faced sandwich (smørrebrød) as a real lunch genre. The cooking of Norway / Sweden / Denmark / Finland / Iceland, written for kitchens without herring barrels or curing closets. 34 recipes across 5 chapters.
Cook Sicilian-American Food
Sicilian-American home cooking — the Brooklyn / Bensonhurst / South Philly tradition, distinct from the broader Italian-American canon. Pasta con le sarde, arancini done right, caponata you'd serve cold the next day, involtini di pesce spada, the proper Sunday gravy with neckbones, ricotta cheesecake, granita from a freezer. The cooking that came over from Palermo and Catania and never quite blended into the generic red-sauce-American pattern. 36 recipes across 5 chapters.
By the numbers
- 22 chapters, 165 recipes, 665 pages across the four books
- ~23.0M tokens, ~11.2 hours of compute, 856 images
- 2,586 generative arcs
- Diaspora Series: now 39 books
- At Home Series: 9 of 13 books generated
Tooling notes
Two small fixes landed in scripts/import-book.ts while shipping these:
- An 80-char cap on recipe slugs, matching the kaya templating filter. Without it, an LLM-regurgitated "title" (953 chars of meta-prose explaining how it would like to extract a recipe title) blew past POSIX
NAME_MAXand crashed the whole recipe import for Scandinavian mid-loop. - A title-length sanity check that skips any recipe whose title exceeds 200 characters — guaranteed garbage; real recipe titles in shipped books top out around 70.
Same Scandinavian session also exposed two larger issues now on the list: no per-step watchdog in the kaya daemon (the cause of the original day-long hangs), and a slug-derived monster-recipe that survived all the way to the PDF before the import-side guard caught it.