A RIDE ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS-YOURSELF

I haven't been blogging lately because I've been entertaining. First the McDaniel duo, then Boy Wonder.

This is that magical time of year, between semesters, when I have only one job, when I can really enjoy my time off, when a day stretches out before me rife with fun possibilities instead of dull obligations.

Five and a half days of eating and talking and lying around and going out and watching movies and doing whatever. Exactly what I needed.

One of the things Boy George and I did, besides smoke cigars and learn Spanish and revisit my hometown (where everything and nothing had changed in 15 years), was make sushi.

Boy got me hooked on sushi. I had eaten it only a couple of times before. Once in college, when my roommate’s boyfriend, a half-Korean Army brat, in a fit of nostalgia, rolled up some plain rice in a sheet of seaweed. It was nothing special. It reminded me of my own desperate attempts, in France, to cure a bout of homesickness by improvising something peculiarly American, like ketchup. The result — a bowl of tomato paste and vinegar — usually just intensified the longing.

The second time I ate sushi was at a restaurant in Tulsa’s Brookside area. I went with some co-workers. I didn’t know what to order. Fearing the fish, I stuck with the vegetarian menu. The thing I remember most about it was that it was very expensive and I felt extremely awkward using chopsticks. One co-worker spent $30 on lunch.

Either the sushi there was unremarkable or its time hadn’t come for me, but I simply didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Then came George. And his Grand Passion. And a local sushi bar.

There is nothing so contagious as a grand passion, especially one for food.

The first time I ate sushi with George was a revelation. I kept thinking about that poem in Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” about the guy — I think it was a priest — who brought back some sand from Egypt to the folks in his small town.

You were like a traveler who brings a little box of sand
from the wastes about the pyramids
And makes them real and Egypt real

Eating sushi with George was like that — like something had been made real.

George’s mom is Vietnamese, and he spent a good deal of his formative years in the Orient. I think Orient is not politically correct anymore, but it’s such a damn romantic word I can’t help using it. It makes me think of Great Walls and Spice Roads and silk clothes and ancient codes of etiquette.

George has made this real for me by demystifying it — by making me also think of South Korean youth gangs, punk fashion, seedy military complexes, state-of-the-art gadgetry and animated porn.

He also suggested that we make our own sushi — can we mere, mostly Caucasian mortals do such a thing? — and he showed up at my house with a book about sushi, a rice maker from Japan (a gadget, not a person), a sushi tray with chopsticks and some seaweed and rice vinegar. The rest we bought at the Asian Mart and Hy-Vee.

Then, with a nod to 2,500 years of Japanese artistry, we rolled our own.

We gathered and chopped all the ingredients, below, an assortment of salmon and tuna and shrimp, plus a few veggies, some mango and a squeeze-tube of wasabi:



Then we tried to figure out how to arrange them on the seaweed so that they looked pretty and would roll up nicely. Being journalists, not mathematicians, we needed some extra help with this, so we read in the book about where to place things and how to leave an inch of seaweed uncovered at the end so the roll could be sealed.



Then Georgey-san figured out, with just a tiny bit of trial and error, how to use the sushi mat to roll up the damn thing. We thought our rolls could be tighter and prettier — what couldn’t be at my age? — but we were basically pleased with our first effort. Sushi chefs, after all, train for years and years, and they are all men, so any deficiencies in our rolls were mostly attributable to my being a woman. Wouldn’t you agree, Boy Sensei?

So here’s what our rolls looked like uncut:




Even though I'm a girl, I got the honor of slicing them into beautiful, bite-size morsels. Unfortunately, my kitchen is not equipped with a razor-sharp blade — Explain to me, someone, why I spent $3,000 on the countertops but am too cheap to pony up $150 for a nice knife — so I ended up using a bread knife to do the honors. You can see the result at the top of this page.

Sushi, our book said, was the world’s first fast food. And Boy and I, ever mindful of tradition, gobbled up this meal as fast as we could.