Yup, I turned 21 two days ago. Oh, before I forget to mention, this post is freshly written, not one of those scheduled ones that have been coming out recently.
Celebration at Tomi Sushi
We had a family dinner at Tomi Sushi on my birthday night.
Tomi Sushi is a Japanese restaurant at Millenia Walk. It's positioned at a higher price point than the Sakaes and Genkis of this world, but that simply means you get better ingredients and more exotic delicacies. After all, #yougetwhatyoupayfor.
I had certain foodstuffs that I definitely had to try. One of which was tuna belly, or otoro, indicated with the red circle in the picture below.
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| Eight kinds of sashimi with three slices each. Price: $140 |
Found only in higher-end Japanese restaurants, otoro is the fattiest cut of the bluefin tuna, and is best eaten sashimi-style or just lightly torched. Not cooking the fish ensures that you won't lose the aroma from the fats and oils in the meat.
The otoro was melt-in-the-mouth tender, and had the fragrance of good fats. You know, like the sinful kind you get when you bite into a piece of deep-fried pork lard from the noodle stall.
Otoro is also available on its own at a princely $52 for five slices.
The other items in the sashimi collection shown above were excellent too. Although salmon is not very special in the sense that all Japanese restaurants sell it, the one served here was extra soft and extra satisfying for some reason. I literally needed to put only a little bit of pressure on it with my teeth and the whole thing disintegrated. Yum!
Another item I really wanted to try was mentaiko, or cod roe. Mentaiko has been in Singapore for a while now, and is most often found mixed into sauce for pasta at bistros and artisanal cafes. But Tomi Sushi sells the mentaiko in its original form, which actually looks quite disgusting.
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| I had eaten three of the five sacs before remembering to get a photo. Oh well. |
The entire mentaiko consists of a membrane layer wrapped around a densely packed ball of tiny pearls. If you've ever eaten tobiko (flying fish roe) or ebiko (prawn roe) you will be familiar with these tiny pearls which, in the case of mentaiko, are orange in colour.
What will probably gross many people out is the fact that you can see veins running along the outside of the membrane casing. Hey, it came from a living animal right? Of course it has veins! Imagine eating a raw human ovary whole. Wouldn't the ovary itself have veins?
Let's talk about the flavour. It was very, very strong and fishy, with a powerful bitter aftertaste. Don't worry though, because chilli powder is sprinkled liberally over the plate to offset the bitterness somewhat. The tiny pearls were smooth and easy to swallow, while the membrane was slightly chewier but still pretty decent. For $8, this dish is worth a go, if only to give yourself the honour of having tasted this seemingly repulsive body part.
The last delicacy on my list was uni, or sea urchin. If raw mentaiko is controversial, uni is downright divisive. You either love it or loathe it.
When I declared my intention to eat uni to a friend over WhatsApp, she said: "Oh, it is such an acquired taste. The first time I had it, I almost puked (because) it wasn’t fresh, (and) I never touched it again. But the second time was when a friend forced me to eat it, (and) it was just splendid. When you get fresh urchin, it is the best thing in the world. Now I have it in all my sashimi bowls."
How I love food that many others hate! In my family I'm the only one who eats oysters on the shell. My parents pull faces when I slurp the slimy flesh, and that amuses me no end.
So it was armed with this adventurous spirit that I proceeded to put a blob of uni in my mouth. The solitary uni gunkan, or so-called battleship-type sushi because of its elongated shape, came as part of a variety set containing many different kinds of sushi. My parents each sampled a miniscule dollop of uni with great caution, after which they both proclaimed themselves "not a fan". Good! I wolfed down the rest.
Online sources I consulted aren't very good at describing the taste, with many content to fall back on the cop-out "You have to taste it for yourself." Here I'll attempt to put the taste in words as best as I can. This was how it was to me:
When it first hits your tongue, you get a strange odour, almost like the water in a heavily used public swimming pool. Then you get salty yet buttery notes, and the creamy consistency reminds you of extremely thickened and concentrated peanut butter. It certainly has the colour of peanut butter... What's that!? Just as you let the entire glob slide its way seductively down your throat, a hit of eye-watering earthy smell, reminiscent of fermented shrimp paste (Malay belachan) or the fruit of the pangium edule tree (Peranakan buah keluak), assails your nostrils.
Doesn't it sound absolutely delicious!? Layer upon layer of punchy nuanced flavours. My god, I had zero regrets. I went on to order two more by themselves.
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| Highlighting how prized they are, two pieces of uni "battleship" sushi costs $20. |
Special mention deservedly goes to the sushi rice. Tomi Sushi imports a unique breed of shortgrain rice from Niigata, Japan, which is used in all the dishes. I don't know what sorcery they cast on the rice plants, but they have managed to produce rice that not only tastes amazing but is pillowy soft and fluffy at the same time. Each individual grain also soaks up every bit of seasoning you could possibly slather on, making it the perfect base for literally anything else on the menu.
The rice and the uni were, quite simply, a match made in heaven.
I rounded off the meal with a scoop of Jersey milk ice cream. They were fairly generous with the portion for $4.20 as it was a big lump. It came hard frozen but the spoon cuts through it easily. The taste was spectacularly creamy and milky, doing justice to the Jersey dairy cows which are valued for their superior-quality milk. What I like about Japanese-style ice cream is that no vanilla is added, allowing the milk to shine through as the star of the show.
Service and ambience at Tomi Sushi were of high standard. The staff were polite and knowledgeable about the menu. Food came out of the kitchen at a rapid pace. The kitchen is open-concept so you can look right in. All the chefs are true-blue Japanese, which is delightful because you can rest assured that they know what is good Japanese cuisine.
The not-so-good part of turning 21
I'm very fond of a formula I came across a long time ago. Have you heard of converting human years to dog years to find out how old your pet dog truly is? Well, there's a formula for converting the age of someone with my disease, Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 2, to the equivalent age of a healthy human being. You take the age of the SMA2 person, divide it by five, and multiply it by 12.
Applying the formula, I am a whopping 50.4 years old.
No wonder I've been feeling so bleah lately! Every day I wake up and struggle to summon the mental fortitude to get out of bed to face the day ahead. It's as if there is a magnetic attraction between my body and the bed.
My physical strength is also waning slowly but surely due to the progression of the disease. I need close to two hours to finish my dinner nowadays because the muscles in my craniofacial area are weak and slow. This is unsustainable in the long run and my doctors will eventually win in their bid to feed me through a stomach tube. My only consolation is that I will still be able to enjoy my favourite food and drinks via oral ingestion like a normal person, with the tube being used to deliver the staple bulky part of the diet that provides the energy to get through the day.
Further along, I will inevitably lose more and more of my bodily functions. That fills me with dread because the day I lose my ability to sit with my laptop and type is the day I lose all sense of meaning and purpose in life.
My parents, who are my caregivers, also aren't getting younger. They're both above 50. I can't afford to outlive them because there's no way I'll be able to survive independently, being completely helpless to complete even basic tasks like feeding myself or putting on my own clothes.
Thoughts like these have been racing through my mind recently as I contemplate all that has passed and all that has yet to be, and I have come to the realisation that, happy as I am with life at this moment, I have no desire to reach the next decade milestone. By then, I'd probably be so far gone that it wouldn't be worthwhile anymore.
Far better to check out of the Planet Earth motel while I'm still active and vital. As they say, quit while you're in front.
(Note: If you are reading this and recall some suicide-prevention message you saw advising you to look out for signs of people wanting to kill themselves, please calm down. I have no intention to off myself. These are just reflections on how things would ideally pan out for me. I leave it in the hands of fate to determine whether it actually happens this way or not, and will not personally make it come true by doing something drastic.)
The good part of turning 21
Becoming a legally recognised adult is, I suppose, a double-edged sword. On the positive side, I have rights now. For example, I can watch any movie I want, even those with gratuitous volumes of sex and violence. I can file paperwork with the government, get married, change my name, and make a will. Not that I have any worldly possessions to will away.
On the other hand, people can also sue me. I can become bankrupt, get arrested and charged for any of the myriad offences in the statutes, and even be detained and thrown in jail for no reason under the Internal Security Act.
The thing I'm most excited about, though, is that I'll get to vote in the next General Election, widely predicted to be taking place next year. I have been taking more interest in keeping up with the news ever since being encouraged to do so by my media writing instructor last semester, and it will be fun to finally get to exercise my power to vote and make tangible and concrete my feelings and opinions about the goings-on in Singapore.
Instead of just writing about them in the newspaper. TODAYonline, to be exact. My university department, the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore, tied up with the editor in charge of the Opinion section of TODAY, and we students were invited to write articles for possible publication there. I was extremely enthused by the prospect of getting a byline in such a major media outlet so I immediately banged out and submitted a piece. From there, I developed a working relationship with the editor including becoming Connections with him on LinkedIn, and suddenly I have a queue of articles, consisting of a mixture of lengthier commentaries and shorter letters, on various current affairs issues pending release.
Perhaps the clearest indication of my newfound adult-ness is that, in my emails to the editor, I open with "Hi Jason," whereas the younger me would have written "Hi Mr Tan".
I wonder what my sociolinguistics professor would have to say about that in terms of theories of politeness and negotiation of social relations.
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