Sushi

That's what I decided to eat yesterday.  I'm still stuck here in Harrisonburg, Virginia - bored stiff.  Now the odd part of that is that I have never eaten Sushi before.  Oh I think I have taken a bite or two of it when someone else offered it to me, but I have never really determined to have a meal of it before.  I've always heard that the first time you eat Sushi that you should do it with someone who knows a little about it, but the opportunity presented itself and I didn't have an experienced companion along, so I just winged it. This place was advertised as a Japanese all you can eat type restaurant so I naively thought it would be like a buffet where you can see what it is you are getting - Wrong!  The petite little Japanese woman who seated me gave me a menu and explained that I could order any thing off the menu and they would bring me a small serving of it, then I could order again and again as long as I could eat what I was ordering.  She was very specific about the fact that if they thought I was wasting food they would charge extra for it on my bill.  I started this little experimental journey into food exploration off with a bowl of Myoshi soup - I think that is what they called it, and some Shrimp Tempura (I knew what that was).

I went from there to ordering a couple of different kinds of "rolls" as they were called - I honestly can't remember what they were called anymore.  I was doing pretty good until I got curious about the green pasty stuff and the small pile of thinly sliced whitish looking stuff on the plate with the Sushi rolls.  I figured it must have been something that I was suppose to put on the roll and take it all in together - I seemed to remember someone telling me that to enjoy the full effect of Sushi you had to know how to put the right sauce on it, so that you could enjoy all the flavors together.  So, I tried a little experiment - I put a nice dollop of the green paste, and a couple of slices of that white stuff on a small section of one of those rolls, popped it in my mouth, and KABLOOOOWEY!  I figured out that particular combination of ingredients was like an ancient Japanese witch doctor's formulation for opening up the breathing passages of a person with severely blocked sinus passages!

I think I learned how not to eat Sushi, but at least I learned a little bit about it.