the best thing about sushi with mom is that she’s practically best-buds with all the sushi chefs, so I usually have access to great stuff that isn’t usually so available. yesturday i had the following items has sashimi: halibut fins (a bit more texturization and crunchiness than the flesh portion, quite fun to eat), a HUGE portion of uni (sea urchin– tastes like sea water), king clam (comes in little slices– has a crunchy effect when raw), of course various parts of the tuna (including some of the best toro I had in awhile, it made my soy sauce oily as hell). to top it all off was rice dish topped off with literally 1/2 an inch of various kinds of caviar (what looked to be salmon roe, flying fish eggs, and a very black but crisp tiny pebbles of something i didn’t know) infused with bits of sea weed (“Don’t eat the damn rice”, my mother scolded). After i scooped off the top layer like a spoiled bourgeois i was for that dinner session, the sushi chef took my bowl and put another layer of decadent textured raw fish eggs, very helpfully making a shifty eyed guesture and “zipping” his mouth for effect. for the course right after was cold japanese noodles with raw abalone in a rich, rich spicy red sauce. the finale was an anti-climactic red-bean ice-cream.
which leads to me to this charming video on youtube. a lot of westerners will probably miss the humor of this video, thinking that the japanese are an extraordinarily anal and weird peoples, but the real joke is on the westerners. particularly of the fascination and obsession with making every food salty as hell (when I got back to the States from a trip to Asia and had a burger and fries I was really dehydrated for the whole day), and literally drowning the food in soy sauce. the “salt bowl” left on the outside entrance made my father and grandfather literally collapse in giggles when I showed them this video.
notice some of the idiotic comments on youtube:
“this is a hong kong video (chinese actors/actress) making fun of japanese traditions and stiffness “
