Flutterby™! : Food flashback

We're gonna disappear for a few days, but Charlene's rented out a hall for a big potluck for her extended family in Fresno on Saturday (any Flutterby readers down there looking to get together with a very diverse group of people? My cell is 415-342-5180...). Somehow we decided that my contribution was going to be sushi, so I went shopping for the Thanksgiving traditional unagi and flying fish roe today, put on dry ice. I'd love to hit Tokyo fish market in El Cerrito, but we're leaving the Bay Area tomorrow, no way to keep stuff fresh that long, so all the exotic stuff has to be frozen. And the local Asian market didn't get lotus root, they said the stuff at the market this morning was sub-par, and I didn't see Natto, although I'm pretty sure I'd be the only person eating that so I didn't look too hard.

If I were just a little more imaginative I'd try to figure out how to make fish eggs, seaweed and rice look like turkey with cranberry sauce...

I haven't done sushi in a long time, haven't done it seriously for other people in a very long time, so when I pulled out the cookbooks and started to review I had this tremendous 1980s flashback, a sudden yearning for squeeze bottles full of brightly colored aoli and syrups, architecturally implausible platings, the whole deal. I may have to find someone to cook venison with blueberries or something similarly bizarre for, just to get it out of my system.