Hey everybody, get this -- I have actually eaten sushi WITH AMANDA! Yup, when we met the first time, in Pittsburgh, she took me to a shushi place. I joked that we ate elk sushi, but of course it was just regular sushi.
So anyway, I love all the things above. With sushi, I like pretty much every kind -- the easy ones like salmon and tuna as well as the more challenging ones like eel. I love ones with roe (fish eggs).
And I also love oysters. When I lived in New Orleans I had them as often as possible. The saying with oysters is, only eat them in months with R in the name. In other words, don't eat them in May, June, July or August -- i.e., summer. I think they're more likely to make you sick in hot weather.
Here's a good oyster story. New Orleanians love shabby little hole-in-the-wall neighborhood restaurants, and most of them have really good food. There was this one place, Frankie & Johnny's, that was really popular. So one night my husband and I went there, and he ordered a dozen fried oysters. Usually we would eat them raw, but this time he got them fried. So the oysters came and when he started eating them, and at first they were good, but then he discovered that many of them were "bad." Like, too old or whatever. He took a bite of a bad one, and it was gross, and he could smell the other bad ones. Out of the 12 oysters, six were bad. So you'd think the restaurant might not charge him for his dinner, right, since they were serving poisoned food that could have easily made him sick? Nope. They gave him half off, because only half of the oysters were bad. Luckily, he didn't get sick and we never returned to Frankie & Johnny's.
However, that was the only time we ever had a problem.
For those who aren't familiar with sushi and/or oysters, a large part of the appeal of both is the sauce you dip them in. With sushi, you dip it in a mixture of soy sauce and wasabi, and top it with a little sliver of ginger. And with oysters, you dip them in a mixture of ketchup, horseradish, lemon juice and maybe a little Tabasco. So in both cases, you probably taste the sauce more than you do the fish.