JI-SHI-KA

Monday is cooking class. This week, we make fried sardine fillets, rolled sushi, and pork-vegetable soup. The soup is the easiest part: we chop the vegetables and meat, then let them cook in broth for the rest of class. Set and forget. The hardest is the sardines. I’ve never even eaten a sardine before, much less pinched off the head, made a slit down the belly, scooped out the guts, then split the body along the spine and pulled out the bones. OK: it’s disgusting. I wonder how humankind ever thought to make food out of stuff like fish or pigs. You have to go through a lot of gore to get meat from animal to edible.

But the results are as beautiful as they are delicious, most of all the sushi.