question: do you have a basket of bunnies?

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It was a sunny October afternoon when I first went to Jae's in the South End for a sushi lunch. The miso was fabulous and before long a plate of cold, raw, slimy seafood wrapped in rice and rubbery, dead-fish-flavored plants. Directly in the middle of the plate were the two delicacies I had not yet tried: sea urchin and salmon roe.

The salmon roe looked lovely, transparant orangey spheres bound with dark seaweed. I picked up one of the spheres and bit it and it ruptured, filling my mouth with the salty, ultra-fishy taste of salmon ovum and sperm. I ate it all.

Next up was the sea urchin. It was a roll filled with pale pinkish-orangey paste. Sitting directly in the center of the paste was a dime-size, quivering, raw quail egg yolk. Because biting through the seaweed wrapper would cause the sushi to fall apart, I put the entire thing in my mouth. As I bit down, the yolk burst and immediately the slippery texture of raw egg washed around my teeth, mixing with the decay-like but sickly sweet flavor of sea urchin. I slowly, slowly chewed and finally swallowed the whole mass. I could feel the raw egg/urchin mixture sliding down my throat and had to swallow once more to get down a rubbery strand of seaweed that was running halfway down my esophagus.