A Raw Deal

 

I had sushi for dinner last night. I and a few friends went over to our favorite sushi restaurant and ate dinner together. I ate raw eel. For sure, it was in a maki and combined with avocado, cucumber, and sweet soy sauce, but I was eating raw eel. That's not the only thing I've had at that restaurant. I have tried just about everything on that menu as long as it isn't too spicy. Yummy, raw fish.

Why is this so special? It isn't at this point in my life, but go back sixty five years and things were much different. I would only eat a short list of foods. My vegetable of choice was corn, which I know isn't a vegetable. However, the only other vegetables Mom would serve were canned, very mushy peas, and canned nasty flavored, green beans. Oh, and the corn? It could not be creamed corn. In fact if Mom put creamed corn on my plate and it touched any of my other food, I would not eat that food. To this day I hate creamed corn, the vomit of the garden. When it came to meat, I liked chicken. Fried chicken, but only and exclusively, the leg. Do not try to put one of those crazy breasts on my plate. I also liked meat loaf, hot dogs, and hamburgers. One other meat thing that I liked a lot, but everybody else hated, was liver. Either beef liver or chicken liver, I loved liver. Weird, isn't it. Mashed potatoes usually were on my approved list, unless Mom screwed them up by whipping them too long. That's when they got gooey. Or whipping them not long enough. That caused lumps and I hated lumps in my mashed potatoes. Other approved items, cranberry sauce, but only the piece sliced from the end that had the imprint of the can on it. Turkey stuffing on holidays, but not the turkey. And that's about it. I was a picky eater. Yet here I am many years later eating raw eel.