Money and sushi

I’m fucking penniless. I’m over come by skintness. It has been an expensive few weeks and I foresee an austere new year. It was not always this way I was quite flush a year ago but twelve months of holidays and an increased standard of living has left me scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Bugger. Where the fuck did it all go?
I should be able to save next year. I will tighten my belt and keep my head down. I will horde Christmas and Birthday money. I shall hide under a duvet and turn the heating off.
Having a girlfriend taps you. She’s not in her self expensive but operating within a relationship means you have to keep putting your hand in your pocket. I bought clothes for the first time in half a decade this year.
Basically before I lived in work clothes and shorts and this was perfectly adequate. Let’s face it I didn’t have anyone to tart myself up for. No one other than my previous girlfriend that is but I wasn’t going to make much of an effort for her.
It’s not until you start spending it that you realise just how little money you have. If it’s all put to one side and only brought out for bills and rent you feel quite rich. You eat in the shop and occasionally treat yourself and you don’t notice it.
I haven’t recovered from Paris yet I’ve just kind of stabilised, but Christmas...o my God. Christmas has punched me in the stomach and left me winded.
The time has come to get strict. I have to put a stop to the frivolities and suck it up. I have to calculate my out-goings and cut corners. It’s time to start building up that nest egg. Collecting my nuts and hiding them because, at the moment, I have absolutely no wiggle room and it feels shit.


Having said all that...Sushi on Thursday!
I love sushi. I absolutely adore it. I mean really. Not in a I’ll look cool if I say I like this kind of way. It makes my mouth water. I love the raw fish.
There is a total connection with the food. There is no barrier between you and what’s on your plate. No chefs skill in the way, no masking with herbs or spices you don’t take the base meet an adulterate it with your whimsy. It’s just you and the fish.
You see I’m a maniac. I go for the sashimi. The sashimi is different from sushi in the respect that there is no block of vinegared rice. It’s just fish. It’s just the raw fish. No rice to distract you from that. No illusions about what you’re eating.
It’s amazing. It’s visceral. It’s as if you’ve pulled it out of the sea and bitten into it as it still flaps, gasping for oxygen in your hands.
The Japanese actually have a dish that does that. The live fish is gutted, skinned and shown the pan for the briefest moment then, still twitching in its death throws, brought to your table.
If it’s not still moving you send it back.
Dear God. Just once in my life I have to try that.
That’s what I love about sushi and sashimi it is the antithesis of the general attitude to food in this country. People are very fussy about their food but not in the respect that they want something of quality or something special only in the respect that they have a very limited culinary vocabulary.
People say to me does your chicken have bones in it. Well, yeah it does it’s a chicken. Vertebrates generally come with bones. We are in a place were it’s acceptable to be fussy about the physiology of the animal we’re eating. It’s to much hassle to work around the skeleton of your pray.
Human beings grow their brains sucking the marrow out of bones they scavenged and now we don’t even want to be reminded that out meat was once a living, breathing animal.
People want their food cooked to the death. Twenty years ago there were a few salmonella out breaks and scares all around the country and since then the public have been genuinely scared of their food. The consensus seems to be that slightest pinkness will kill you. It won’t. Old meat will make you ill not raw meat. We evolved on raw meat. It’s our heritage.
Let’s embrace it. Let’s start eating everything again. Let’s put the clock back fifty years and break out the offal. The kidneys, the liver, lets put the oven on low and roast some hearts. Why not? They’re in your burgers; they’re in your sausages.
Fry up some sweetbreads with egg. Trust me they rock. Not all sweetbreads are testicles just some of them. You have the neck glands as well. They’re called sweetbreads because they are sweet. They’re wicked, try them.
People avoid these things not because they don’t like the taste of them, because they wouldn’t know, but because they don’t like the thought of them.
So much is wasted. When you and your tribe butcher an animal all you should be left with is the hide and the bones and you can wear both.
Everyone wants the choice cuts, they want the fillet and then they want it fucking incinerated.
Sashimi motherfucker!