Tag: fish

I would love to tell you all what I ate at Kobe, but I really have no idea. Now you may be thinking of course you have no idea it has been almost a month since you ate there. Well, that really has nothing to do with it. I didn't remember what I ate when I left there either.

Here is the problem. Once the fish is cut and put on to a piece of rolled up rice, it all looks the same to me; except for Tai which looks extremely different from the tuna.

So all I know is that I ate a lot of raw fish. Included in that line up was at least 4 pieces of Tai (Red Snapper), some Toro (Fatty Tuna), probably some Maguro (Tuna) and Albacore (White Fish), and one order of Hotategai (Scallops wrapped in Nori). I also had some Philadelphia and Cucumber Rolls and an order of Tomago (Egg Nigiri).

As you can see I ate a lot. I could have sat there longer and eaten more, but that would get mighty expensive.

After we left Kobe we went to the Orange Pearl Yogurt Store where I got a Strawberry Mango Smoothie. That helped to finish filling me up.

I have to say that Kobe is where I first fell in love with Tai. I had liked sushi before the Tai, but I did not yet have a love for it. Then I decided to order Tai. It came out looking different from the other fish. It is white with a slight red color to one side of it. And a slice of lemon tops it. Tai has a sweetness to it that is remarkable. If you aren't sure about sushi or have not yet fallen in love with it I must suggest trying Tai. It may convert you for life (I'm talking to you too Mrs. Savory!).

Kobe I love you and your Tai! I'll be back soon.

Well, as Tele has previously posted, the other night we went to Kobe. I think its a fine little sushi bar, and I must say that while I was there I fell in love with Red Snapper. That's some awesome fish, I tell you what.

The problem, however, is as much as I love sushi, I can almost never eat enough of it. I can eat .. well.. quite a bit more than I logically should be able to eat, and I fear that it's my voracious appetite that will condemn me to a) not eat enough at a sushi bar, b) eat so much at a sushi bar that the itamae and I have to battle in hand to hand combat because they have nothing left in the restaurant to eat, or c) I've eaten so much sushi that the Pacific ocean is declared devoid of life. A good example, is what I had to eat today. I had the following to eat:

• 4 cups of coffee
• 1 cup of tea
• 5 bottles of water (16 oz)
• 4 sandwiches
• 1 cup cheese popcorn
• 2 truffles
• 1 pear
• 1 stuffed pork chop
• 1 baked potato
• 1 bowl of cinnamon apples
• 1 bowl of coffee icecream

At the sushi place, if I recall correctly, I had:

• 5 pc cucumber roll
• 5 pc philadelphia roll
• 4 hamachi (yellow tail)
• 2 red snapper
• 2 crab roll
• 3 cups green tea
• 1 16oz sake

and we went out for frozen yogurt afterwards, in which I had a 16oz plain with pomegranate seeds.

I think I have a tapeworm. He and I understand each other.

So, there's this sushi bar down the street, on Flamingo and Fort Apache. The itamae there are part of some sort of sushi cabal, and they look at you like you're a freak if you can't put away at least fifty bucks worth of sushi in a single sitting. (For the record, that's about eight or nine orders of nigiri. You could choke a small dog with that.)

Savory, Tarthead, and I, brave adventurers all, decided to brave the rapids there. Savory was my secret weapon, my revenge for getting the you no eat sushi very often look. In the course of a typical workday, I've seen Savory pack away four donuts, two submarine sandwiches, and a plate of pad thai. Like most men with the capability to ingest several times their own mass in meat, he's freakishly small.

After dropping off the kids with a random stranger, we converged upon the restaurant and were presented with one of those sushi tick mark sheets.

I hate those sheets. First of all, I'm perfectly capable of ordering sushi in Japanese (I don't speak Japanese, but I do speak sushi). Second of all, with three people, two tick marks can be easily mistaken for an eleven. I've seen people mow through eleven orders of hamachi nigiri before, so that is totally not an uncommon scenario. And thirdly, yes, please, let us all handle a piece of random paper and then hand it to the guy who touches the uncooked belly meats that go in your mouth.

All of this has nothing to do with this particular sushi restaurant. I just need to rant sometimes. And it's going to be freaky in the future when you have to ICQ your itamae just to get your maguro pronto.

Anyways, having been given the paper bullet, we had to plan ahead. No problem; by the time we all had one order of something to eat, we had a traffic pile-up of little plates. This is a situation that the Japanese call frickin awesome.

And the fish? Yeah. The fish was great. I wouldn't say they're particularly above par on the fish I like to eat (for instance, the closer Hikari sushi bar has the best, butteriest yellowtail ever invented). The unagi was pretty standard, the tuna, delicious. Of course, I didn't order what the others ordered, and I can tell you they both have a pretty hefty recommendation for you. When they get around to posting...

One of the most interesting things one will find on an internet bender is that throughout the world one will find poultry to be pretty much canonical wherever Christmas is celebrated.

In most of the western world, poultry is defined as turkey. However, children in Japan apparently wait in long lines outside of their local KFC in order to get a bucket of fried chicken. Ukraine families celebrate with a gigantic, twelve course meal in the name of the twelve apostles, devoid of any meat except for fish, while children wait for Father Frost to visit their homes. In the United Kingdom, duck or goose may replace roast turkey, depending on the number of guests.

Before the turkey was introduced to the UK in the 1700s, the traditional medieval dish was either peacock or boar. In modern Hawaii, it isn't uncommon to see Japanese influences such as turkey teriyaki. The Christmas chook, meaning chicken or fowl, is a common sight in Australia.

Obviously, one of the things we're going to have to delve into during this month is the preparation of poultry dishes, in celebration of Christmas tradition and fantastic cuisine. We're looking forward to it.

We've known for bazillions of years that wine is subjective, but it's interesting to learn that white chocolate goes well with caviar, that Slim Jims are made of mechanically separated chicken, that there's a drink made of bird's nest, or that you can eat fish poop. I feel a bit patriotic about my regional specialty, but then again, that's pretty normal, in a world where disgusting vegetarian clones of the already amorphous chicken nugget is sold outside of the endless army of chicken restaurants that all want to look the same. It can be cheaper to make your own breakfast foods, not to mention healthier in a day and age where butter flavoring gets abused and trans fats take all the blame.

I'm looking for the worst recipes on the internet for a running thread on EdibleUnknown. Here's a few of the ones I found so far: * California jail burrito spread. Apparently, this is a special treat for the inmates. Ick.

• I am speechless. Look at this. Yes, I'd like to teach my kids to eat out of the litter box. I can't imagine how this could be fun.

• Some of the comments for this recipe on Food Network's site are too good to pass up.

• Food Network has the best complaints ever. I swear.

• Paula Deen's heart is going to explode one of these days.

• A satire on how not to write a recipe.

• This can't be real.

• It takes a lot of Google page views to find the really good failures at foodtv.

• This looks like something James Lileks might own.

• What in tarnation might this be?

• Mmm, fish just oozing with goodness.

• Yes, I know some people like animelles. Via Look At This.

• Some commenters can be so ungrateful.

• Even the name sounds good.

• The recipe might be just fine, but the first commenter acts as if though the very existence of the recipe ruined CHRISTMAS.

• Trying to imagine what this tastes like is like the whole Mary's Room thought experiment- very difficult. I wonder if Sandra Lee has a grassroots rating-inflater/dumper society; her recipes seem to polarize the food network bunch.

• WHAT. IS. THIS?

• Read the comment entitled "the best chicken mini pot pies ever!". Poor Sandra.

• Number 3 is throwing up? I thought it was "alone time".

One sushi bar ingredient I have a love-hate relationship with is kappa, known in English as the cucumber. Apparently, the Japanese term is based on a river goblin, named Kappa, who has a fondness for cucumbers. Nice circular logic, there; if I were going to name members of my family for the things they ate, I could name my daughter Random Scraps Of Paper and my wife Tasteless Vegan Filth. But I digress.

Cucumbers aren't exactly my favorite sushi ingredient, mostly because the fresh taste and crispness seems somehow wrong inside something made of raw fish; it tends to make me think I just bit willingly into a bone left in by some sadistic itamae, getting revenge for me not pointing my chopsticks towards magnetic north when I put them down on my plate. But in cucumber salads or sunemono, they come into their own.

Looking at online recipes, I saw an awful lot of recipes that include sake and rice wine vinegar. Since I'm too lazy to drive to Chinatown for one ingredient, and my children don't really need any extra sake in their diet (says the woman; personally, I believe that drunk children are sleepy children), I decided to play with the recipe a bit. And by 'play', I mean get retardedly creative.

I like rice wine vinegar, and I use it in an awful lot of foods. In fact, it's my second favorite vinegar upon God's slightly fermented green earth. However, I do hold true to the belief that the Japanese would have never invented rice wine vinegar if they'd had the miracle that is balsamic vinegar. I'd gush and all, but I believe the Masochist detailed his unending love for the purple here.

Now, people who know stuff about cooking, like to complain, and have way too much time on their hands to search the internet for blogs may interject that "balsamic vinegar is nothing like rice wine vinegar", on the basis that the first is sweeter, thicker, and much more complex. Thanks. Gee, I didn't know that. Of course balsamic and rice wine vinegar are different. Read the previous paragraph.

However, there is a very important factor here- the differences mean that you can't adulterate balsamic vinegar with salt and sugar in the same proportions as rice wine vinegar and end up with a similar salad topping. In fact, Italian cuisine purists might even argue that to adulterate balsamic with anything at all is akin to blasphemy, like some massive malediction called down upon Vatican City.

Luckily, I'm Protestant.

After cubing two cucumbers and mixing them with alfalfa sprouts (no mung beans... darn), I contemplated the balsamic like some sort of scrying pool. And the oracle revealed to me that mixing the vinegar with one third its volume in sugar and microwaving to combine was, as it were, All Good. And there was a tiny amount of salting and peppering, but not enough so as to offend the NeoRomans.

For a final flavor kick, I put about two tablespoons of sesame seeds on foil and put it under the broiler on high for about four minutes, just to toast them for salad purposes. And you know what? I thought it was superawesome. Our resident Tartologist thought it even better the next day (today).

So maybe I'm crossing roads that aren't meant to be crossed. The point is, make do with what you have, be aware of subtle (or blatant) differences, and always smile like a killer when someone else takes their first bite.