The Fish Market at Tomari Port

Last weekend Jonah asked (well... pretty much begged) to go to the fish market to get some salmon. He is more adventurous than me when it comes to making your own sushi. I don't know why I doubt him, he always does a great job. This time I had even checked out a sushi book from the library to find out exactly how they make that rice so sticky. And I even learned what kind of solution the Japanese use to flavor the rice and keep the rice from sticking to their hands. So, with my book and Jonah's gusto we felt adventurous enough to finally buy something from the fish market.

Fish markets are great because they smell all fishy inside and kind of give you the heeby jeebies, but Japanese ones are even better because they have weird stuff like sea snakes in tanks.

Yikes.








And this.

 Yikes again.










But we make our way over to the edible stuff (by our standards) and pick out our fish for the day. Jonah decides he wants some dark red fish (I couldn't figure out exactly what it was) to go with his salmon. We buy our slab of salmon and decide we should leave before we lose our appetite  :)

So we take our salmon and mystery fish home and the sushi turned out pretty good. We just fixed nigiri, or sushi, depending on which you refer to this style of sushi with. Nigiri is basically a ball of rice with a slice of raw fish on top. While we were fixing it we were just cutting off slices of this raw salmon and eating it. It made me crack up to think about what we were doing and how I had never even seen sushi until I went to college. I have to say though that salmon is the best-tasting raw fish. It has a wonderful texture and a nutty flavor that tastes delish with the soy sauce. Yum. If you're hesitant to eat raw fish remember that adding just a little wasabi to your soy sauce might prevent food poisoning. You need wasabi "because the Japanese diet includes quite a bit of raw fish which, potentially, can contain parasites and bacteria and because of it’s strong antiparasitic, antmicrobial and antibiotic properties it [wasabi] could even prevent food poisoning," according to one website. You don't have to worry about it when ordering from restaurants, but when making sushi yourself it's VERY important to make sure the fish is "sushi-grade", meaning it meets the freshest standard. You usually can only find "sushi-grade" fish in groceries in coastal regions, where fish is caught daily. We finished our sushi off with some edamame with sea salt. It turned out to be a really good meal thanks to Jonah!

Other Sushi favorites....
Katie: Rainbow roll, Alaskan roll, Philadelphia roll, California roll
Jonah: Spicy tuna roll, Marine Boy roll (spicy tuna roll with salmon on top)

And thanks to my friends here I've just discovered that I really like Thai food, so I'm sure you'll be reading about that someday too! Hope you guys have a great weekend!! Love yall! Zeno and Tiffany, hope yall had fun in LA!!