Les Bonnes Choses

There's a division of labour in our house -- or, at least, there was when I had Rebecca with whom to divide the labour. Generally speaking, Rebecca handled the grocery shopping. In retrospect, somewhat odd, given that I was the one who generally turned the groceries into meals, but appropriate given my general disinterest in leaving the house to go shopping. Those grocery delivery services were invented for people like me: highly functional shut-ins. So it should be unsurprising that I have been rooting through the freezer like a pig hunting for truffles so I can delay the inevitable trip to the grocery store as long as possible. Unfortunately, I have picked all the low-hanging fruit (that is, the entree-qualifying items not hidden by bags of frozen berries), leaving me to find forgotten freezer bags of unidentified slightly freezer-burned meat.

So the other day I decided to wing what is probably my favourite dinner on the Cheesecake Factory menu: tuna tataki salad. An interesting side note: cilantro features prominently in this dish, as prepared at the Cheesecake Factory. I hate cilantro. The smell of it makes me slightly nauseous. It is to my great consternation that pretty much every dish served at Cheesecake Factory, with the possible exception of most of their cheesecakes, use cilantro. But the taste for cilantro is apparently genetically determined, so it's not like I'm just being difficult. In fact, in some of the reading I did for a paper I am working on, I learned that people's tastes differ because their chemical receptors for the flavour carrying molecules are physically different. As a fairly close analog, people generally take for granted that a red crayon out of the Crayola box looks the same to everyone, though that is not the case (for colour-blind people, for example). If you're a picky eater tired about getting flack about not eating your quiche (egg + cheese + spinach = gag), science is here to the rescue.

Um, yeah, so back to the story at hand. The tuna tataki salad at Cheesecake Factory is so good that, even with the cilantro (which I scrape off), it's probably my favourite thing on the menu. So naturally, when I found a freezer burned slab of formerly sushi-grade tuna at the back of the freezer, I figured I may as well trim off the dried out bits and give it a whirl. Half-way through preparing it, I decided to see if I could find a recipe to see if I was on the right track (I was, but I hadn't guessed that lime figured into it). And dammit, did it ever turn out good.

Now, tomorrow is the Northwestern Homecoming parade, which will include NU alum Stephanie Marsh -- an impossibly white actress who I kind of sort of recognized. I wouldn't normally care, as I don't watch TV much anymore. However of more interest is the fact that Ms. Marsh's husband, Iron Chef Bobby Flay will be in attendance. I'm holding out hope that his ulterior motive was to come here to challenge me to a throwdown after the parade. And if the challenge is to make a freezer-burned entree, he is totally going to get pwned.