Sushi & Other Smelly Foods

I'm kinda ripping off a post from another blog, Daydream Believer.  She talked about how she doesn't like Sushi. 

I like sushi OK.

If I am at a Japanese Restaurant, I will eat lots on sushi and enjoy it.  If I am at my mother-in-law's house, I will eat sushi and enjoy it.  But you won't see me searching through the fridge & cabinets hoping against hope that somehow there is an overlooked plate of sushi.  (I'm usually hoping for Ding dongs.  But they never materialize.  Sigh.)

My husband doesn't like sushi.  He's Japanese.  He's supposed to like sushi.

It's not that he doesn't like it.  He's allergic to fish. 

I married a Japanese guy allergic to fish.

That's like being married to a Frenchman allergic to cheese.

You know my husband isn't from Japan, right?  He's from California.  He says "Dude" and everything.  His parents aren't even from Japan.  They were both born in Hawaii.  But their parents are from Okinawa.  So technically, Greg is Okinawan, not Japanese.  I mean, he's American.  With Okinawan ancestry.  Or Japanese ancestry, depending on the point he's trying to make. 

Whatever he is, he is allergic to fish.  So we don't eat a lot of sushi.

Remember when sushi was weird?  Remember in Mr. Baseball when Jack (Tom Selleck) told Hiroko (Aya Takanashi) that he didn't eat bait?  I love that movie!  That was only 1992.

Sushi is very mainstream now.  You can buy it at the grocery store.  In Corpus Christi, Texas.  You can't get more mainstream than that. 

We do eat a lot of other weird foods though.

My boys love to go to the Asian Market.  We always buy a big tub of Nori.  Nori is dried strips of seaweed.  Sometimes we get teriaki flavored nori. Sometimes we buy plain.  My kids eat it like potato chips.  The whole tub never lasts more than a day.  I never eat any.

Sometimes we buy dried cuttlefish.  It's like fish jerky.  And it stinks.  Sometimes it is sugared.  Sometimes it is spiced with pepper.  It always SMELLS BAD.  Kids love it.  Not me.

We buy seaweed jelly to eat on rice.  I mean, for them to eat on rice.  It smells AWFUL. 

We always buy a tray of mochi.  Mochi is a soft doughy rice cake with sweet bean filling in the middle.  It's the consistency of a marshmallow.  It's actually pretty good, and I do eat it when we buy it.  I eat one.  Jojo will eat the whole tray if we let him.

The kids LOVE salted plums.  Salted plums are plums that have been soaked in a peppery brine for weeks, then dried.  They look like something studied in medical school.  They are so salty, my blood pressure rises just looking at the bag.

If my in-laws are coming to visit, we buy arare.  (Pronounced Ar-Ra-de)  That's flavored rice crackers with soy nuts, wasabi peas and dried fish.  Whole dried fish.  With heads and tails.  And eyes.  I love the crackers.  Love the soy nuts.  Love the wasabi peas.  The dried fish?  Not so much.  So I give them to the kids and they gobble them up like the good little nihonjin they are.

We also buy a jar of kimchi.  Kimchi isn't Japanese, but it's very stinky.  It is also very yummy, and even I like it.  I prefer the stink of kimchi over the stink of nori. 

I am glad my kids like Japanese and Asian food.  It's part of their cultural heritage.  Believe me, it's hard to promote Okinawan-Japanese-Hawaiian-Californian heritage in Texas. 


I would feed them Irish food, but the only Irish food I grew up with was Corned Beef & Cabbage, and I hate it.  Plus, cabbage stinks almost as bad as dried cuttlefish.   

I wish we were Italian.  Italian food smells heavenly.