Three Things Meme - Thing One

[pshaw_raven]

 I asked dorchadas for three things to write about - random things that I may or may not care about. The first of those was ... sushi!

I'm on the fence about sushi. On the one hand, even before I was vegan I didn't much like raw fish. So rolls with cooked shellfish were okay, except the nori. I still haven't developed a taste for seaweed. And given that in America, at least, there seems to be a preponderance of giant rolls held together with sheets of nori, I'm SOL. 

However, I did have an opportunity many American sushi fans don't get, which was to go to Japan and eat sushi there. Yep, the fish is still raw. Yep, there's seaweed. Hmmm.

Japan is not an easy country to be vegan in. In the States the joke is "why does this have milk in it?" (hint: farm subsidies) whereas in Tokyo the joke morphed into "why does this have dashi in it." But I did discover that avocado rolls are good, and they do have a small variety of veggie rolls depending on where you go. We liked going to this one conveyor belt sushi place called Genki Sushi that had some pretty interesting concoctions. Fox is a big fan of spicy tuna rolls, whereas I developed a taste for, apparently, fatty tuna. I was slightly handicapped by my mere six months of language learning and almost total lack of previous sushi experience. So I tended to just tap on whatever rolls looked good and wash them down with cheap refills of white wine.

Back home I'm more likely to try to encourage my taste for seaweed by getting inari pockets when we go out. I've had plain ones where there is just a little ball of cooked sticky rice inside a tofu pocket, but the local sushi place tops theirs with a dollop of seaweed salad. I learned that certain fried rolls are just a way to recycle leftovers, and that cuke rolls are actually pretty good with a swirl of sriracha on them. 

Comments

[evilpettingz00]

I recently had the most AMAZING sushi I have ever had...and it was vegan! It was a spider roll with the main ingredient being tempura mushrooms. I was worried about that since I don't always like mushrooms (texture), but oh man, was it good. I didn't want to eat anything else ever again after that experience.

[dorchadas]

Fatty tuna is so good. I barely eat sushi here in America anymore after living in Japan...

I knew several vegetarians who gave up in disgust after a while living in Japan, or at least became pescatarian while they were there. They figured that's what they were going to be anyway due to all the fish in everything, so they might as well embrace it.

[pshaw_raven]

That mushroom roll actually sounds really tasty. I think I'll Google that and see about making some!

[pshaw_raven]

I decided not to get too bent out of shape about it. If I saw a veggie option on a menu I'd get that, but I was really craving some veg-heavy dishes when I got home. I was surprised at how fried-food and meat oriented almost everything was, but then America is the same way when you go out to eat. We did cruise through a couple of grocery stores, just to see more like what people would eat at home and it was a lot of fun comparing theirs to ours.

[evilpettingz00]

There's a (small) picture and description of it here, in case that helps:

[evilpettingz00]

So good!!!