Raw fish and shredded coconut

Inspiration: Clare Crespo's 'The Secret Life of Food'

Created: Wed 1 Oct 2003 00:06

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On Sunday night I delved once again into the delicious world of Clare Crespo's The Secret Life of Food. This time, I made sushi cupcakes by icing some carved-up cupcakes with icing that I mixed with shredded coconut, and then topping the cakes with assorted lollies and dried fruit. The seaweed surrounding the sushi rolls was made from fruit roll-ups which were meant to be green, but ended up being dark purple, as it seems that Australian supermarkets don't see fit to stock green roll-ups.

The only condiment suggested by the book was sliced up dried mango to approximate ginger, which worked well. Had I thought about it a bit earlier, I would have added some other things to make the cupcakes more palatable. (In the end, who wants to eat a cake surrounded by a chewy glob of roll-up? Not me, that's for sure.)

One of my ideas was to have a chocolate sauce or topping as a soy sauce dipping substitute. Yum. Plus, there really should have been wasabi. You could probably make wasabi by adding some green food colouring into some cream, and then whipping the cream to within a centimetre of its life. Or, you could chop up a marshmallow into a small dollop-sized piece - but it'd have to be a green marshmallow, and I don't know whether they make those (dying a marshmallow sounds like something that wouldn't work out well, but you never know!).

Last night we went out to Sushi House Ben-K (formerly The Japanese Restaurant That Dare Not Speak Its Name) for dinner before heading back to stare in wonder at the sushi cupcakes. It was a truly sushilicious night. Something that I haven't been able to get out of my head is the fact that top quality and relatively authentic eating establishments do not end up doing as well as they ought when the popularity wagon rolls around.

Less than a month ago, Mikasa Japanese restaurant (billed as contemporary Japanese cuisine) closed its doors. In its window now is a sign to let everyone know that coming in its place is a "Sushi Wushi" store - which looks like it's going to be more targeted towards the young and hip.

When you can go to any shopping centre in the country and munch into a teriyaki chicken hand roll, why would you bother to go to a place like Mikasa or Sushi House Ben-K to have a tekka temaki? It's not a huge, poor quality multi-national taking over the delightful corner store, it's a case of clamouring for a position against a huge bunch of other stores, all willing to offer something approximating an authentic experience, at a lower (but not that much lower) price. You would think that the complete and utter awesomeness of places like Ben-K would mean big business, or that, at the very least, it would do well because it got there first. But this doesn't seem to be how it really pans out.

Quality over quantity, people. Once you've tried Shigeo's vegie rolls and salad don, anything else will taste like sandpaper in your mouth.

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