Not so very long ago (say, last week), I didn’t get sushi. Chunks of raw fish or eel or squid or sea urchin? Good for aquariums and not for my belly, says I! Oooo how very wrong I was. Gone are my days of California rolls and a pouty lip when friends suggest a meal of nigiri. Bring on the raw fish! Particularly if it’s salmon and even more particularly if it’s made by the genius sushi chefs at Shiro’s Sushi in Seattle. Before being introduced to Shiro’s (thanks, Cath and Troy!), I always thought sushi-lovers were a bit hyperbolic in their love of the stuff. How can cold fish and clumps of rice be satisfying? Turns out I was just eating on the wrong coast. I think I’ll always be an east coast girl through and through. unless I’m eating sushi. When we sat down at the sushi bar, Cath and Troy confidently said “Omakase!” I ducked my head down (keeping the planks of raw squid and fish out of eyesight) and looked for the words “roll” and “vegetable” on the menu.

When I handed my checked-off menu to the chef, he looked at me (I swear there was a twinkle in his eye) and he said “you let me know if you want anything else as we go along.” sushi chef coat los angeles By the end of the night I was a full-fledged omakaser after watching Cath and Troy chopstick mouthful after mouthful of intriguing-looking delights. jiro dreams of sushi playing in torontoFor those of you who don’t know, omakase basically means you entrust your menu to the chef, so s/he’ll make you whatever is fresh and most delicious. sushi rush online gameI love the idea of putting your gustatory trust in the hands of a virtuoso sushi chef. sushi frenzy online game

There’s something wholy (and holy) satisfying in surrendering yourself to what is beautifully presented before you. That mean that sometimes you get sea urchin (still scares me a bit), but it also means you get a salmon nigiri that melts in your mouth like warmed butter and pure joy.sushi for parties brisbane Another part of the beauty of omakase is that you don’t just get a big ole plateful of sushi in your lap at once. jiro dreams of sushi stream hdThe chef hand-rolls each nigiri, so you wait every few minutes in between these melt-in-your-mouth mini monuments of delight (now who’s hyperbolic?!). sushi order manilaAnd while you wait, you can chat to the chef and your fellow diners. Suddenly the meal is more than just food, it’s about a relationship to what you are eating and who you are eating with.

Have you guys seen the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”? If you haven’t, do! I think it’s on Netflix at the moment. I watched it many months ago before my personal sushi enlightenment last week and it gave me an inkling of what I experienced at Shiro’s. Now tell me, have you guys always been sushi lovers or did it take you a while to come around to it? If you are a sushi lover where is the best place you’ve had sushi? I now feel like I should move to California or the PNW just so I can always drift away into omakase bliss whenever I need to. Thank you so much to you and Troy! I really never understood you guys when you would go on and on about good sushi in LA. I really don’t think it makes sense until you have amazing sushi. So much of my sushi life has been from grocery stores and subpar sushi places. I still will be partial to vegetable rolls when I’m in those places, but I’ll always be yearning for the real thing. I think that tamagoyaki is one of the best things I’ve ever tasted in my life.

And unlike most desserts where the sugar leaves you craving more and more, this was such a perfect balance just as it was. You guys basically are responsible if Matt and I end up moving out to the west coast. Lar wrote this post before her surgery last week so I figured I should include an update on her progress. On Friday she had to go back into the hospital because she was developing an abscess from the surgery and had a high fever. The good news is the doctors were able to drain the infected area before it got really bad, but it has made the recovery process more drawn out. Lar is still in the hospital, but should be released early this week. I’ll keep you all posted and just want to thank you again for all of your wonderful words of support. 12 documentaries on Netflix that will make you smarter about business Here’s a quick and fun way to enrich your business knowledge: streaming documentaries on Netflix. The online movie and TV service has a vast cache of business and tech documentaries that anyone with a subscription can watch instantly.

The topics range from profiles of great tech innovators like Steve Jobs to deep dives into industrial design. Each of these 12 documentaries offers an entertaining storyline, as well as valuable insights into business success. Alison Griswold contributed to an earlier version of this article.If, however, the visual apprehension of food creates such tension for the mind and body—a short-circuiting of our sensory instincts—why do food-centric movies remain so popular? The answer, of course, is that food, like clothing, is an incredibly rich cultural signifier and storytelling device, both ripe for fetishization and so familiar that we often overlook its cinematic affect. Thus, Feast for the Eyes: a blog that seeks to chart the gastronomic iconography of the screen, move forward from simple fantasies of edibility, and ponder instead the depths of narrative, character and theme that a simple pastry can encode between its buttery layers. And also answer questions like, “Why is running your own bakery so often presented as the be-all and end-all of feminine happiness?”

From Chocolat to Chef (see this menu explication from Roy Choi himself), from Tarantino to Miyazaki, from The Trip to, well, The Trip to Italy… you’ll never watch a dinner table scene in the same way again. We start with dessert: a seemingly harmless plate of strudel from 2009’s Inglourious Basterds. And note – this dish contains spoilers. Besides linguistic ability (or lack thereof), food is the primary means for social manipulation in Inglourious Basterds—and the grandmaster of the film’s particular brand of gastronomic chess is Christoph Waltz’s sublime, despicable Colonel Hans Landa. It’s hard not to love a villain who’s a foodie, and who, more importantly, uses food as his chief means of asserting power. Of the film’s five chapters, three (One, Three and Four) adopt a dining table as location for the central action: in the farmhouse of the most wretched dairy farmer in France; at a fashionable, Nazi-swarmed Parisian restaurant; and in a basement bar, respectively.

These setpieces, static as they may seem at first glance, are where the theater of power dynamics, facilitated by Quentin Tarantino’s tight-as-a-drum dialogue, gets the most play. In Chapter Three, “A German Night in Paris,” the second of these table sequences involves Shoshanna Dreyfuss (the equally-sublime Melanie Laurent) and Landa at Chez Maurice (ironically, really the Cafe Einstein in Berlin). The scene unfolds to the audience as a single, chillingly impenetrable, question: Does Landa know that the young woman opposite him in a fashionable Parisian restaurant in 1944—apparently the gentile theater-owner Emmanuelle Mimieux—is really the Jewish escapee of his farmhouse massacre in 1941? Shoshanna’s presence at this table—first with director Joseph Goebbels and would-be-paramour Frederick Zoller, now with Landa—is ostensibly by invitation, though all parties are aware that she is here through sheer coercion. As he did in Chapter One with the hapless Farmer LaPadite, Landa methodically twists the metaphorical knife into his unwilling companion.

Settling into his interrogation, he orders Shoshanna and himself each a strudel, a glass of wine for himself, and then, in either cruel coincidence or the gesture of a cat playing with its mouse, a glass of milk for her. And while Landa is too clever to play his cards at this stage (we imagine), it’s hard not to take this—as Shoshanna does—as a sly nod to her true identity as a dairy farmer’s daughter. More notes on dessert choice: Strudel, Austrian in origin, is a dish with nationalistic significance for Landa, who though stationed in Paris is Austrian by birth. Also (in what is, yes, an interpretive stretch – but our compliments to Wikipedia), strudel is originally a German word meaning “whirlpool” or “eddy.” Whether or not Tarantino was deliberating planting that etymological Easter egg, could any image be more symbolic of Shoshanna’s current psychological state? At any rate, the strudel arrives, but Landa realizes out loud that he’s forgotten the dish’s key ingredient: whipped cream.

Throughout Basterds, Landa is given a slyly cartoonish lechery, from his massive calabash pipe to his leering at the farmer’s three lovely daughters. Yet with his large head and narrow shoulders, the buttoned-up colonel hardly cuts a figure of masculine heterosexual carnality, whatever sexuality he possesses taking second place to his maniacally complicated political games. It is with food, then, that the character’s lust—for blood and otherwise—finds the most accord. Landa has a weakness for dairy that runs into the fetishistic, we already know from Chapter One: In that first scene, he refuses wine in favor of milk – a childish gesture that becomes distinctly repugnant when he downs the glass in one go, all lip-smacking, lascivious relish. Here, at the restaurant, Landa directs Shoshanna like a puppet. Just as she makes to tuck into her dish, he stops her: “Wait for the cream.” (Waltz delivers this line with such unabashed teasing glee that it’s a highlight of his Oscar-winning turn.)

Unseen hands dole said cream out—the camera is fixed on Shoshanna and Landa, sitting in silence. Then, rather suddenly, we are treated to lavish close-ups of the cream, looking pristine in its bowl. The shot is disquieting, so intently have we been watching the two faces. Springy and white as snow, the cream cuts cleanly and perfectly by a ladle, and sits with admirable firmness atop the powdered sugar of the pastry. “Not so terrible,” Landa pronounces obsequiously. While Shoshanna’s single bite of the dish is wary and obligatory, and she can barely tear her eyes from him, Landa consumes his strudel with gusto, by all appearances more interested in his dessert than Shoshanna’s murmured responses to his questions (save for a precipitously lengthy shot of Waltz at his most forbidding—just for kicks). Until, that is, the end of their conversation, when, getting up, he stubs his cigarette out right smack into his unfinished pastry. The ensuing close-up is a picture of dirtied pristineness;