I'm not much of a cook. My idea of cooking most nights includes micro-waving last night's take-out leftovers. If I must cook "from scratch," I'll make pasta with sauce from a jar. I do, however, appreciate good food and I like trying new things. Of late, I've gotten over most of my childhood food phobias. These phobias involved mostly seafood which is strange because I'm from New England. I still have not braved clam chowder but salmon, shrimp, and white fish are some of my favorites now. Tuna was always legit, never one of those icky things I found disgusting without ever tasting. My family is more of your meat and potatoes type, and while my mom experimented a bit with American standards like beef, iceberg lettuce, cheese and beans, she never quite broke the Asian ethnic barrier with anything more than her American Chop Suey.

Since moving to Los Angeles, I've tried with many different types of food. You go out to dinner with friends a lot in LA, and like any large and diverse city, you're gonna end up going to Japanese, Indian, Moroccan and Russian restaurants along with the old standbys of French, Italian, Chinese and American. One of the key figures in exposing me to diverse tastes is my friend Micah. Micah is a great cook. He has that important quality needed by all the best chefs: he is excited about and interested in all kinds of foods, tastes and cultures. He's been on a Japanese kick lately, often going downtown to the Japanese market in Little Tokyo. Recently he asked me to join him there, and then in the preparation of a Japanese meal.

I have little experience with Japanese food. I'm a fraidy cat when it comes to sushi --I used to only eat the California rolls and the tuna. Raw fish sounded excruciating to me, though I always wished I were brave enough to try more of this beautiful cuisine. My biggest problem with sushi was the texture I imagined raw fish would have. I'm a stickler for texture. I cannot, repeat, cannot, abide onions or any other squishy and slimy food; raw fish screams both squishy and slimy. As far as any other Japanese fare, I had no idea what it would entail.

One rainy day Micah and I went to the Yaohan Plaza near downtown Los Angeles. There were retail stores and restaurants in the plaza as well as the market. We poked around in a store solely devoted to "Hello Kitty" merchandise. It was darling. We went into a fantastically large book store with books, magazines and music. I could not keep myself from buying what I can only imagine is a Japanese teeny bopper magazine -- the fashion in which is leagues away from Seventeen. We went into a ceramics shop filled with elaborate dishes and statuettes of kitties and the like. Eventually we tore ourselves away from the pottery and made our way to Mitsuwa market.

From the outside, the bright colors reminded me of a 99 cents store. Once inside the mood was a little different. There were balloons and floral arrangements. The aisles were brightly lit and clean. Women giving out samples of all different kinds of food were everywhere. The bulk of the shoppers there were about 5'4" and under and mostly female. Micah, at 6 feet, was the tallest person there. I was too overwhelmed by the wonderful world of Japanese packaging to notice much else. Everything was attractively presented. Advertisers and marketers must all be geniuses in Japan. My god, they even made a package of corn and mayonnaise spread look somewhat appealing (yes, I did say corn and mayonnaise spread and no, I didn't try it).

The food was pretty wild in comparison with most Western stuff. Lots of gelatinous fare, tons of noodles, pickled everything, soy, soy, soy and glorious looking fish. Raw tuna is so beautiful. It's this gorgeous red color and it looks soft and deliciously creamy. We picked out two packages of tuna (chutoro and tuna kakugiri), some Chilean sea bass and some yellowtail (hamachi, which is another type of tuna). We got rice, three types of seaweed (one for snacks, one for sushi and one for soup), green beans, daikon, tofu, miso, and, of course, sake. By the time we got out of the market I was completely fried. It was like when you go to the museum and after a couple hours your mind can't take anymore stimulus; you get really tired. That's exactly how I felt. But I perked up when we got home.

Since I'm not the greatest cook, Micah assigned me something easy: green beans in a peanut and soy sauce dressing. It looked quite good and more Western (i.e. easier to make) than the other dishes we would be preparing. The recipe must have lost something in the translation because the dressing I made as instructed was dry as a bone while the picture of it looked so creamy. After some experimentation and creativity, the dressing was done. Testifying to the yumminess of it, I spent some time licking the bowl clean. Our friend Kathie made the spinach dish and the miso soup. Micah made the dashi (broth of konbu seaweed and dried bonito flakes) that was an ingredient in practically every dish. Then he prepared the sushi. When all was said and done, here is what we ate. Micah? Take it away ...

MISO SOUP - The freshly-made dashi make for a delicately flavored, slightly sweet soup. The miso paste, a white variety from Hawaii, seems to account for the sweetness. Apparently, miso soup in Japan varies from salty to sweet depending on how far south you go. Our Sous Chef Kathie made a bit of a preparation gaffe when she added twice the amount of cubed tofu to the soup. That made it difficult to sip from the bowl, as an avalanche of tofu would hit me in the face each time I drank. While the flavor was good, the presentation wasn't right. Aside from the generous amounts of tofu, the miso soup was cloudy and never "separated." That would seem to be because at some point after the miso was added, the soup came to a boil. Nobody can recall this happening, but it was a busy kitchen. I have since made miso soup with instant dashi and different miso paste. I got a little closer. The soup looked right (separating as it sat in the bowl) but it was a little too salty. I know that the second type of miso paste that I bought is closer to what I want (it's Japanese and more salty than sweet and doesn't have the same fermented smell as the first), but I need to try again with the freshly-made dashi.

SEARED KIRIMI TUNA CUT ROLL - Absolutely beautiful pink-purple-red fish flesh that didn't seem to have much flavor. After a little experimenting, Sous Chef Kate lightly seared one side of the Kirimi Tuna and I rolled it in nori (seaweed, in this case prepared for Sushi use). The roll was uninteresting, it didn't taste bad, it just didn't taste. Instead of wasting all of our seaweed on cut rolls, I instead laid the sliced, seared fish on a plate and dressed it with green onions, ginger and ponzu (a mixture of lemon juice and soy sauce). That worked well enough. The fish was a little overpowered by the dressing, but with a light-tasting fish, that's easy to do.

YELLOWTAIL SUSHI - Sous Chef Kate and I rolled the sushi rice (good flavor, really terrible mushy texture ... I've gotten better since then ...) into "fingers" on which we laid the yellowtail with a little wasabi. This is a pretty common way to serve it, and is called nigiri-sushi. The yellowtail, imported from Japan, was very good. If the rice were better, it might have been perfect.

CHUTORO SUSHI (FATTY TUNA BELLY) - I keep finding this defined as "Marbled Tuna Belly," but it's more than that. We served it nigiri style and it was soft and melty. It is a cut of tuna (like filet mignon and porterhouse are cuts of beef) that has a very high percentage of fat-to-muscle, making it exceedingly tender without a significant tuna flavor. Toro is any part of the tuna belly (maguro being the rest of the tuna). Two other types of toro were available to us that day: negi-toro, or tuna belly with onions, and otoro, which is different from chutoro in that is a bit more sinewy (which by no means makes it bad, just a different texture).

SPICY TUNA HAND ROLL - We took the tuna kakugiri and chopped it up, adding Japanese mayonnaise, red-pepper paste, masago (capelin roe) and green onions. We rolled it in nori with some radish sprouts. The tuna was fine, but our bad rice tainted this dish.

GRILLED MARINATED CHILEAN SEA BASS - (marinade of ponzu, mirin, sake, rice vinegar and green onions) Worked pretty well ... tasted pretty good. Next time, I'll shoot for crispier skin.

GREEN BEANS WITH PEANUT DRESSING - Sous Chef Kate's execution. The best vegetable dish we had, hands down.

SPINACH WITH SESAME DRESSING - Good color and presentation. Middling flavor. What it needed was more vinegar and less crushed sesame seeds. Worth trying to make again.

GRILLED EGGPLANT WITH SOY SAUCE - Not a winner. Too salty, too soy, too difficult to make. It's still sitting in the fridge, uneaten and ignored.

NAMASU (MARINATED DAIKON AND CARROTS) - Stinky but tasty. Ours put off a "farty" odor that came from the daikon. I think that is because of how we cut it, using a cheese grater instead of a knife. Ours had a vinegar flavor, slightly sweet. I have since eaten it in a restaurant and it was cut differently (larger, longer julienned daikon and carrot) and was sweeter and less vinegary. I liked the restaurant version better than ours.

THE SUSHI RICE - Sushi rice is different from regular rice in that it is cooled with a fan and a mixture of salt, sugar and rice-vinegar is added to give it a little flavor and a glossy glow. We fucked that shit up bad. Almost all of the bad parts are my fault. I added too much water to the steamer, let it cook too long, and then when the cooling and flavoring stage occurred, I ended up pulverizing what was in the bowl (the Japanese have a special bowl called an ohitsu; we used a wooden salad bowl). Our rice wasn't glossy ... just mucilaginous.

THE FISH - This is the right season for fish. We were able to get good yellowtail and chutoro because this is the time of year that the fish are all fat from their summer and fall feeding frenzies. Most of the fish that I've eaten in the past few weeks have been pretty good, and we will have good eatin' until about April. Eat your fishes, girls and boys, they're good for your brain.

We were full. Micah spared us from a tortuous agar-agar dessert (you don't want to know) and pretty much all of the food that we made, we ate. I'm a tiny girl and looked pregnant when we were done. I did my best to clean my plate and wipe my face and stumble out to the car. I wasn't overwhelmed anymore, just tired, full and happy.

--Kate Murphy and Micah Forbes