1. Eat something else before you eat sushi.

Sushi is not meant to fill you up and make you feel satiated.  That is what chicken fried steak is for.  Sushi is made to give you a light, delicate meal of many flavors and textures.  Don’t go trying to throw it down and fill up the tank.  Just sample a lot of different things, and then go hit Wendy’s afterwards if you’re still hungry.

2. If you smell fish, turn tail and run!

Fresh fish doesn’t smell fishy.  If there are nasty smells inside the restaurant, or if your particular fish stinks, ask for the check and run.

3. Be adventurous: it’s really quite good.

Try all sorts of things you might not otherwise try.  This is coming from the world’s most stuck-in-a-rut eater, but I enjoy trying various kinds of Sushi.  None of them are a huge commitment (only one or two bites) and you can easily get the bad taste out with some Diet Coke.

4. Bring your wallet.

Good sushi is pretty expensive.  Prepare yourself accordingly.

Someday I am going to be in France and I’m going to sit at the end of a long banquet table, surrounded by friends and family, and we’re going to have a 9 course dinner.  It’s going to start at 3 in the afternoon and go until 9 at night.  We’re going to eat small, light portions, and break up the eating with anecdotes, laughter, entertainments, and joy from being together.  There will be a large fire burning at either end of the dining room, and a joyful house staff waiting to cook and serve for us.

This is a dream of mine.

Instead, my sad reality is that most of my meals are composed of some pre-processed, pre-prepared food, hastily slapped together and quickly consumed.  Lately, my sodium-filled delights of choice come from Subway and Chick-fil-a.  I also enjoy a good Firehouse Sub every so often, but in these slim economic times, I prefer to walk across the street and save $2 rather than driving down to Firehouse.

So my problem is twofold: 1) the nutritional value of what I’m eating sucks and 2) the rate at which I consume said unhealthy food makes it doubly unhealthy.  I eat so fast I tend to consume more than I probably should.  Someone once told me that if you eat slower, you give your stomach more time to send the signals to  your brain that it is satiated.  I have no scientific basis to accept that other than to say – I think they’re right.  Even though nerves pass signals really fast, my stomach is kind of dumb and lethargic and sometimes doesn’t know its own state of being — kind of like this guy:

More often than not, I eat because of habit rather than because of hunger.

So, I’m  thinking I need to join the Slow Food movement.

I find that when I cook a meal, I tend to eat less of it; sometimes because I’m just tired of the smell and want it flushed down the drain, sometimes because I tasted along the way, and other times because working for it just made me less hungry for it.  The food most often tastes better because I use fresh ingredients, but is more difficult to do because it involves planning.

I tried this theory out last night by making fajitas and spanish rice from scratch.  “From scratch,” meaning, I used a McCormick spice pack for the chicken and rice from a box.  But besides the help in tempering the food, none of it came pre-cooked.

The result?  Two very satiated adults with indigestion.   Maybe the tomatoes I used had been in the fridge too long, or maybe the spanish rice spice packet had something in it that disagreed with us.  Either way, slow food has turned into slow-to-digest food as well, and I’m seriously considering something much lighter and fibrous tomorrow.  Perhaps we’ll just gnaw on a head of lettuce…

I hate following trucks.  I usually pull all kinds of illegal and unsafe maneuvers in order to get in front of different trucks.  But today, I was mesmerized by the smells coming from this truck, through my air conditioning, and filling my car!!  It was a heavenly smell.  Fresh, handmade tortillas… mmm… Had we not been on a major thoroughfare, I would have gotten ahead of the truck and flagged it down. I’ve never wanted a breakfast burrito so badly in my entire life!

But for reals, what was I to do?  How does one actually go about getting food out of these trucks?  Do you just follow them until they stop?  Certainly they must stop somewhere.. but where?

It’s a mystery.