If you knew sushi…

In which our intrepid blogger joins the 21st century

So I had sushi last night for dinner.

I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking this is a post that I wrote in 2005 and it disappeared down a wormhole, only to surface now, years after it has lost all relevance.

But no: I’ve been ducking the stuff for years.  Why?  Sushi has fish in it.

Something fishy

My problem is that fish generally tastes like fish, which is a problem because the taste is roughly the same as the way fish smells, and I don’t like the way fish smells.  I know, intellectually, that fresh fish doesn’t smell, and in theory doesn’t taste the way it smells because there is no smell to associate with said taste, but that never seems to matter to my taste buds, irrespective of how fresh the fish might be.

But if you take the fish and batter the crap out of it, fry it mercilessly, and give me a ton of tartar sauce, I might be able to stomach it, because it’s nearly impossible to deep fry something and make it less edible. (Exception: licorice.)  Tragically, expecting deep fried sushi is sort of missing the point.

Genki-Ya

Then two things happened.  About a month ago a sushi place promising “all organic” foods opened up a mile from our home, called Genki-Ya.  As inherently terrifying as the word “organic” is to me–because what the hell was I eating before: inorganic food? Holy fuck!–the whole “high-end sushi” presentation made me curious.  If I didn’t like sushi from a place like this, surely I wouldn’t like it anywhere.  And once I knew this I could get on with my life, confidently declaring, “no thank you, I have tried sushi and I did not like it” to anyone that offered.

Second, it got very hot.  Sonofabitch hot, the kind of hot where the only thing you can utter regularly is “sonofabitch it’s hot” all day.  And I did not want to cook.  (We have no air conditioning + I do almost all of the cooking = this means we starve.)  I also didn’t want to eat anything hot.  Or see the word “hot”.  Or hear someone say “hock” because I might think they were saying the word “hot”.

And so we bought some sushi.

And?

And I liked it.  Just don’t ask me what I ate.  Not only do I not know, I don’t want to know.  I plan to let my wife order whatever she thinks I’ll like and live in ignorance regarding what it is I might actually be ingesting.  That’s just fine with me.

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No Comments

  1. P.S. Jones on July 19, 2010 at 1:05 pm

    I’m not a seafood person either for just reason you stated. (Growing up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, this made me an oddball.)Deep fried is my exception, too. But I love, love, love sushi. I think it’s because they hide it in rice, avocado and sea weed. My husband is a seafood fanatic and we often end up at sushi places to compromise on dinner.

    • genedoucette on July 19, 2010 at 1:28 pm

      I’m in New England, which is also big on seafood, but while I can eat shellfish without reservation, something about white fish always… ech.

  2. Tao Joannes on July 19, 2010 at 1:05 pm

    SUSHI!!!
    I love the stuff. If it tastes/smells fishy, don’t eat it, it’s bad and will make you sick.

    Funny thing is, the sushi is the rice, the flesh is called sashimi.

    If you put sashimi on sushi, you get nigiri, a little bit of meat on rich.

    Now, if you roll the rice in a piece of seaweed paper, and put some sashimi and veggies and other stuff in it, you get a nori.

    I mention all this because sometimes they put tempura in sushi and roll it into a nori, which gets you to what you love, deep-fried sushi.

    *the more you know

    • genedoucette on July 19, 2010 at 1:29 pm

      I’ll have to write all of that down. Someday maybe I can order my own food…!

      I did have something with tempura in it, I think.

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