July 13, 2007

Sushi! ...baby firefly squid (hotaru ika) in a sauce of Japanese mustard (karashi) with rape-blossom buds (nanohana). Then chopped raw toro topped with caviar. Then seared bonito (katsuo tataki) with crispy seaweed (ogo), woodland ginger and bamboo (myoga take), wasabi greens, and those little purple shiso flowers. Then steamed asari clams from Chiba in their broth. Then icefish (shirauo)—tiny, almost translucent fish with buggy little black eyeballs which can be had for only a few weeks in early spring—served in sizzling white-sesame oil with Kalamata-olive paste and sprigs of newly budded prickly-ash leaves (kinome). Then a hot pot of cherry trout (sakura masu), whose season also lasts only a few weeks in spring. And then, after the kaiseki overture, the sushi feast begins....
posted by HawthorneWingo 17 years ago
  • Yum! Have we had the sushicam?
  • Excellent piece! I'm quite hungry now. Lord's fishy chillun Chillee Ugum's arch nemesis? With a smaller knife, the long quarters of the fish are cut into sections. Iida-san uses the breadth of four fingers to measure these sections before cutting. "Generally speaking, Japanese man has eight centimeter." One of my best friends, from Tokyo, always says with pride, "It's not the length that matters, but the stiffness!" Meanwhile, in the candyland of the West, where few people have ever heard of Tsukiji, what once was repulsive—the raw flesh of that laid-open tuna, the raw flesh of all that swims and slithers at Tsukiji—is now craved, more widely and more ravenously each day. !!!
  • Now I've got this song stuck in my head.