Things My Hus...Boyfriend Doesn't Like

Dear Tofurkey,

Your crab cakes look delicious, as does your salad (which seems to follow my Simple Steps to Super Salads, coming soon).

My boyfriend (no, he is not my husband) also has things he does not like. His dislikes tend toward the categorical instead of obsessive perfectionism (that's my department). Unlike your husband, whose reluctance to immortalize the inferior I share, mine (again, boyfriend, not husband, really) just does not like certain foods. I've taken the liberty of making a list for you and our blog public should it be important for blog challenges and such:

1. Peanut butter
2. Gelatin
3. Peanut butter flavored gelatin
4. Raw fish (although this is pretty much a texture dislike related to gelatin)
5. Raw fish with peanut butter on them
6. Chocolate combined with mint (or peanut butter, and these are how you know he's really crazy)
7. Mushrooms (but only sometimes; this one's really vexing)
8. Middle Eastern food, nuts besides peanuts, and cilantro (or so he thought until I educated him against his will)
9. Cats covered in peanut butter (OK so it's not a food, but if you hated peanut butter, wouldn't that be hell for you? I mean, just think of things you hate most in the world, then strap it to cats. Now, isn't that worse?)

So these are limits more or less. There is some wiggle room (you can sneak mushrooms by in some things and Philadelphia rolls are A.O.K.), but for guaranteed success, stick to these guidelines. In fact, if you do this, I promise that success is easy. I can't tell you (and you our tiny but ever-growing blog public) how many times I've looked up from my food across our dinner table to ask whether my boyfriend thinks the food is too this or too that only to find that his food is all gone and he's licking his plate on his way back for seconds.

That is, unless the food is sushi.

As you know, I love sushi. In fact, we called ahead to Japan to alert them that they might suffer a food shortage shortly after we arrived (we haven't heard anything official, but there was talk on the plane back of relief expressed in the newspapers at our departure).

Not so much my boyfriend. On his first day at work, the group in Japan insisted on taking him to a traditional Japanese dinner. The first course was sashimi. The second course was peanut butter sashimi. Just kidding. It was almost worse. The second course was a jiggly-bowl of mushroom tapioca. He came back raving about the shrimp tempura they'd gotten. I asked if that was his favorite course. He said it wasn't a course; it was one, lonely oasis of shrimp tempura. The rest of the seven or so course dinner he had to choke back. Poor guy.

Poor guy indeed if he couldn't appreciate sushi in Japan. I've thought a lot since we got back about whether to say it's better or not and I think the answer is no; they're just too different and there are things to like about both. To be sure, the fish in Japan is unreal. It's fresh and flavorful; it almost melts on your tongue like butter (read: buttah if you're into the NY Jewish thing). But you almost never find rolls in Japan, and certainly none with the mixture of 20 ingredients you regularly find in the U.S. And why would you? The fish has so much to offer that anything more than rice, wasabi, and soy sauce takes away from the flavor, and those are pushing it.

This is how almost all sushi in Japan is prepared, what I've always called nigiri sushi. Watching it get prepared made me think all I've heard about so-called sushi "chefs" is hype because it essentially involves taking a slab of admittedly delicious fish and shaping it to a chunk of sticky rice with wasabi on top. But it is exquisite. And it's much cheaper. These plates of nigiri probably cost about $2, and they're fancy salmon and tuna. Yes, not only are fish different, but there are several kinds of tuna or salmon you might order which have different flavors (and associated costs).

As you can see, it's not impossible to find rolls in Japan, but this is tuna with some scallions and maybe a bit of dressing. It's well short of the concoctions I normally find in sushi places around here. Since I've been back, I've eaten some of those concoctions and I find that I really like them. It's almost like two different kinds of food.

All of my observations must be taken with some salt. In part due to my boyfriend's dislike and the fact that there were so many awesome places to eat, we never went to a really fancy sushi restaurant. At the very high end, maybe things are different. But we ate at some nice places that served sushi, and my conclusions are therefore based on experience in a variety of sushi-eating contexts. But I do have a favorite: the conveyor-belt sushi place.

As with most things in Japan, they have there shit together on this. The top picture shows what you sit down to at one of these places. not only do you have soy sauce and chopsticks (in the drawer), but you get green tea powder. What this picture doesn't show is the faucet to the right where you can get hot water to make your own tea. And you would love these places if only because you get a whole bucket of pickled ginger you can take from for free.

Basically, you go in, they sit you down, you take care of everything yourself (although you can order something particular from the chefs behind the counter) and when you're done, at least at one place, they come over with some kind of electronic wand that they wave over your plates. This calculates what you ate and how much you owe. You pay, leave, and smile at a seamless and tasty experience.

Here are some other things you might see on this conveyor belt. As with many things in Japan, I can't always tell you what they are:

Wish you could have been there.

Love,

Turkey