Foodin' Ain't Easy (or, Masochism In The Kitchen)

When I met David, he was a reclusive nerd who ate Wendy's almost every day of the week and only left his apartment for work. And he was far, far too thin. I love food (like, really, I don't think you understand how much I love food), so I saw David's eating habits as a sort of project.

With only a few months' tutelage, David was not only leaving his apartment more, but he was actually eating three meals a day, and had gained ten pounds. We became FoodNetwork aficionados. For Valentine's Day we made Rahmschnitzel (and again for his parents only three days later). Over the next year we made French onion soup, miso soup, scallop pot pie, turkey pot pie, cherry pie, blueberry pie, all kinds of pie, raclette*, and sushi.

I turned David into a foodie. It's the best.

We're pretty much obsessed with sushi, and we've recently gotten hooked on this thing they serve at sushi places called Tuna Tataki. It's seared tuna in (depending on where you get it) a ponzu sauce, or tataki sauce, or, like in the recipe we used, soy-ginger-lime sauce.

LOOK AT THIS. IT'S BEAUTIFUL.

But it's (predictably) expensive at sushi restaurants, and in any case, they don't give you nearly enough. At least, not enough for people who eat like fat kids. So the other day, we decided to make it.

We bought a beautiful tuna steak, and while David was in class I was supposed to get the rest of the ingredients. I thought it would be boring to do alone, so I called Jon and asked if he wanted to go on a foodventure.


We went to Kroger and knocked off most of the ingredient list, even though it took forever because they hid the peanut oil and the sesame seeds. When we finally found both of them (after walking around the whole store twice saying "SOOO-SA-MEE SADS",) they were hella expensive. Jon talked me into buying the sesame seeds at the little Asian market across the street, because they would be less expensive and I'd get more of them.

Because who couldn't use more sesame seeds, am I right?

I had driven by [the store] a bunch of times, but never gone in. It really doesn't look like much; it's a really small storefront and the windows are covered by flattened boxes. "Dubious", is the word I was looking for. But I trusted Jon, so I followed him in.

[This store] is a small, badly lit, dingy, creepy place with only two shelves. The shelves are sparsely stocked with jars full of unidentifiable goos, and cardboard boxes labeled with permanent marker. There is no music, and there is only one person working there. The big bag of sesame seeds I got was indeed cheap, but it was covered in some weird sticky residue I'd rather not know the origin of. On the way out, Jon called my attention to a small green box labeled "Placenta soap". It didn't say where the placenta was from, but to be perfectly honest I don't think that detail would've swayed me much.

That pretty much did it for me.

I hustled our asses out the door, and once we were in the car, I spent a good ten minutes shouting at Jon (who thought it was extremely funny) about how I was never setting foot in that store again, and how ridiculous it was that I even had to explain to someone why I didn't want to patron a store that peddles placenta goods (of indeterminate or determinate origin, it really makes no difference to me).

In case any of you had any doubts as to the veracity of this claim.

I dropped Jon back at his house and went home to get started on the prep.

The first thing I had to do was mince a shallot. I had never touched or seen a shallot before, but I figured, they're just like, small onions, right? Can't be too difficult. Onions are my area of expertise, after all.

If you're not familiar with shallots, let me explain a shallot to you. You know how when you cut onions (and if you don't, you've seen it in pretty much every movie or show), you cry? It's because the smell that wafts out gets all up in your tear ducts and bites something fierce. Big onions are bad enough, but shallots are about six times the bite in about 1/3 of the package.

As if it wasn't bad enough to be sobbing and stinging over the counter, temporarily blind, with a very sharp knife in my hands, Mason, who loves to try and get involved in Mumma's cooking, came up and started meowling and trying to climb up me to get to what he was under the impression was some very tasty Krab (imitation crab, hence the K).

SO I CAN'T DRAW KNIVES. LIKE YOU'RE SO PERFECT YOURSELF.

This went on for several minutes (because mincing takes a little while) with Mason becoming increasingly attentive and more devious in his attempts to get TASTY TASTY KWAB, alternately taking swipes at my hands and jumping up onto the counter, and at one point sinking all of his front claws into my bottom. I wasn't pleased about that.

Finally I let him smell it.


Once that was finished (and I had spent a good five minutes in the bathroom with a wet paper towel over my eyes), I turned to the ginger. Which, as it turns out, was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Have any of you ever seen a ginger root? I feel like I've heard it called "a hand of ginger", but that could also be completely wrong. This is what ginger root looks like:

Yes, there is a plant that grows that looks like a mangled Muppet hand. And we grind it up and eat it and put it in lotions. You're rubbing mangled Muppet on yourself. How does that make you feel?

It's not fantastically easy to peel, ginger root. You might not have guessed that; conversely, you might be a person with eyes. There are all these weird, frustrating knobblies that confound your standard vegetable peeler with an infuriating sort of indifference. You have to cut the knobblies off, and if you're feeling adventurous (like I was), you can cut those down and peel them too.

And there is the stringiness, which makes it harder. You know how with, say, a potato, when you see a brown spot under the meat, you can dig it out? Forget it. Ginger roots are nothing but sub-dermal colors.

Peeling ginger roots is like playing with your first pocketknife. You think you're really smart and you know exactly what you're doing, but you don't, and you're bound to get a lot of cuts and scratches in the process, and things are probably going to get thrown. Unintentionally.

If you're as lucky as me, you'll get to pour lime juice in those cuts and scratches later! Yay!

Ginger roots are fucking obnoxious, is the core theme of what I am getting at here.

Then I got to take all that peeled ginger, and grate it with a cheese grater, which made my fingers even worse. Then I got to pour lime juice all over my raw-meat fingers, and all over those little cuts and scratches from peeling ginger and my wonderful, annoying kitten! Yay! And I'd been standing for about two hours, so my heels, accustomed to being snugged up in a blanket or kicked up on a couch, felt completely flat, and my thighs and butt hurt, and I was just a very grumpy Kelli in general.

I'm going to start using this as a reaction to things.

And then, after all these really dumb things, David showed up, and made everything better, and we made delicious delicious tuna tataki, and then we ate that delicious delicious tuna tataki, and I had a much better night watching the worst season of Top Model ever, with my wonderful foodie boyfriend.

And that is the story of Kelli's Tuna Tataki Foodventure! Thank you all for reading. :]



*Remember when I said I was getting a raclette oven? WELL I GOT ONE. FOR CHRISTMAS. IT'S EVERYTHING I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE.