Marbled Fish

Or is it garbled fish? There's babblefish! None of the above. I'm doing some time travel while I eat leftovers and create nothing new. I enjoy sushi-the higher quality the better. My current favorite Japanese restaurant is Sakura-bana in Ridgewood. Everything is good there, but particularly the sushi. Sometimes, though, I just get some sushi grade slabs from Mitsuwa in Edgewater (CA and IL have stores too) and slice it up myself (though you can ruin a good piece by slicing it wrong...not to say I know how).

Earlier this week, I devoured a small slab of yellowtail that I got from Mitsuwa. Yellowtail is one of my favorites whether raw or grilled since it's wonderfully fatty. For me, the fattier and stinkier the fish, the tastier. Ya, I'm one of those... Now and then, I'll buy a slab of salmon (one of my other favorites) and an onigiri from Mitsuwa and devour it all in the food court with the help of my trusty pocket knife. My high school friend introduced this idea to me a while ago, and I find it a tastier and cheaper alternative to the pre-made sushi boxes in Mitsuwa. They used to have a sushi bar in the food court, but it disappeared with the market's renovations.

I digress. So I bought a nicely marbled fatty piece of yellowtail to eat at home for lunch the next day. Honestly, I don't know how to best pick the raw fish nor slice it properly. It cured my hankering for sashimi though. Here's a photo of them looking quite perky with the pattern of the coloration. They remind me of buoys or the end of a dog's "paint brush" tail.


I ate them with the requisite soy sauce and wasabi plus a bowl of hot rice. Yum! I wish I had purchased an onigiri as well (I suck at making them taste as good as store bought...will remedy that in the future...watch for it!) but plain rice would do. My favorite fillings for onigiri are mentaiko (spicy cod roe), seaweed, sansai ("mountain vegetable") and sake (salted salmon). If you haven't eaten these rice balls, you should try one if you stumble across them. Simple but really tasty with a nice crunch from the nori. No pics sorry.

While on the subject of raw fish, Mitsuwa had a demonstration in early November of how sushi chefs properly reduce (slice) a whole fish into sushi and sashimi. More specifically, it was a huge 400lb bluefin tuna flown from Spain, never frozen. Ya, it was that fresh. It's head was almost as large as a barrel! They were selling the cut pieces at a great price! While I enjoy regular (akami) tuna, I'm not a huge fan. However, this stuff tasted incredibly clean, fresh and 'sweet'. Maybe I'm usually served yellowfin tuna. It's definitely a step above what I usually get. I bought a slab of its chutoro which was specially discounted. Mmm...fatty tuna. It is the middle of the road fatty though since the highest fatty cuts are more expensive. Chutoro would suffice and yes, it was nicely marbled with fat. Ah, fish bliss...I think I bought a not so great cut, or I sliced it improperly because it had some chewy membranes in it which made it not so blissful. Check out the fat in this photo! And yes, it's the same dish I used for the yellowtail. That's because it has a fish motif! ;)