Over Thanksgiving, a friend was in from out of town. Miriah and I went to see a movie with her and then suddenly found ourselves at a sushi restaurant.
Sushi is something I do not understand. As far as I do understand, the driving force behind sushi is people will pay to eat raw fish that has been draped over a bundle of rice and seaweed. It is only slightly more logical than paying to eat a steak you have to cook yourself.
Miriah doesn't really do sushi either, but for the sake of politeness we took off our shoes and pulled up a chair. I scoured the menu for something I would enjoy and luckily found vegetable tempura. Miriah decided to try some sushi. The table ordered four rolls, each a different kind. There was your typical raw fish on top of rice and seaweed variety, fried crab, and semi-spicy sweet potato.
Miriah avoided the raw fish since she doesn't even like cooked fish. (I'm not the only fan of the kids' menu in our family.) I stuck with my fried veggies. Till the end.
I was persuaded to try the semi-spicy sweet potato sushi. Being the adult that (chronologically) I am, I dipped the slightly-more-than-one-bite-sized roll in soy sauce and shoved it in my mouth. I assume you eat the rolls all in one bite, hence the shoving.
That's sushi. That's what people lose their minds for. I might never know why.
Despite the protests that the roll was not actually spicy, I felt the familiar burning of the taste buds. It was nowhere near as scorching as those wings, but there was kick nonetheless. The most surprising part came after the slight heat subsided. After the heat was nothing. If the sushi had not had that semi-spicy sauce, it would have had no flavor at all.
I'm not normally one to knock bland foods. In fact, a lot of my favorite foods would never be described as "bursting with flavor." But people are obsessed with sushi. People who consider themselves super into food and its accompanying flavors. So why are they into sushi? It tasted like nothingness. There was no complex interplay of flavors, no delicate balance of x and y.
I admit that I only had one of the apparently multiple varieties of sushi. Maybe other varieties have more flavor. But I'm not willing to risk my money on that. Do you know how cheap sweet potatoes and rice are? So much cheaper than sushi! Maybe I'll come back to sushi in a couple months and find that there's something I didn't pick up on the first time around. For now, sushi very securely remains on the "Do Not Eat" list.
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