Cooking other meats as if they were fish

You could make it: " . . . how to cook on a habachi" (which is a traditional small indoor grille) or any indoor grille. Any number of things could be cooked on it using the Japanese teppanyaki style of cooking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teppanyaki

Mark Moore said:

I've got an upcoming scene in my current "Vampire Killer" story where Ashley and Kioko (my MCs) go out for dinner to a Japanese steakhouse. Neither of them like fish nor any other kind of seafood, so they stick with beef and pork.

Kioko likes to cook at home - in sharp contrast to Ashley, who's an "eat the cold sausage straight out of the package in the fridge for breakfast or maybe nuke it in the microwave to be fancy" kind of girl. Part of the humor comes from Kioko's reactions to Ashley's lack of giving a crap.

While they're at the restaurant, discussing their mutual dislike of fish, Ashley playfully expresses faux-surprise that a person of Japanese descent doesn't like fish, to which Kioko replies "If you want, I can show you how to cook various types of meat as if they were fish." The thing is I'd like to know if such a thing is possible or not (I know next-to-nothing about cooking and certainly nothing about recipes), so I'll know whether to write it as a joke or straight.

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I don't quite understand what you mean it to mean.

You can cook a meat (be it beef, fish, chicken, whatever - flesh), in a variety of ways.

You can poach, saute, broil, grill, fry, bread, etc., etc., etc. You can make veal picatta, chicken picatta, fish picatta, etc. You can make fish en papillote, or chicken or...you see where I'm going with this.

Japanese fish is often served sashimi-style, which you can do with beef but not chicken, but it's not to do with cooking. It's also, afaik, as I'm a vegetarian, served poached or broiled in/with a miso or some other such. So could anything else be.

Japanese (sauce) char-broil fish. I think originally they were prepared in wood/coal-burning fireplaces. An expensive dish.

ETA: Obviously one can char-broil any meat.

If you want some wit jokes, Sashimi beef ^_^

Here's an article about the Japanese perception of the flavor of meat and why it's often cooked in certain ways and with certain ingredients. (Fish isn't considered meat in this case.)

I can't think of any way you could cook fish that you could not cook red meat.

You can cook vegetables, potatoes, fish, meat, tofu... most things really, by sauteing, deep frying, boiling, bbqing, baking... whatever. The basic cooking methods are pretty standard, only time, heat and a few other factors vary depending on the ingredients.

Speaking as someone who is not a fan of "fishy" fish - cod for example, I find there is a massive range of flavours.

So I can't stick anything cod-ish, but I like tuna.
I'm quite fond of prawns, but can't stick crab.

Smoking changes the flavour - I like smoked mackerel, I don't much like fresh mackerel.

If they don't like "fish", they could try tuna.

Fish cooks faster than red meat, so the only thing Kioko will have to do is slice the meat especially thin.

As an aside, I don't believe that "Japanese steakhouses" are in fact Japanese in the sense of reflecting the national cuisine. As I understand it, Benihana's was founded in the US in the mid-20th century as a novelty teppanyaki restaurant designed specifically to appeal to steak-eating Americans, and its success sparked the copycat popularity of this kind of restaurant throughout the country. So far as I understand it, to the extent that "steakhouses" even exist in Japan, they are mostly presented as serving Korean or Mongolian barbecue, with the teppanyaki style not being very popular at all.

If your character is native Japanese without that much experience of the US, she might be surprised that the steakhouse even claims to be Japanese. Of course there is a lot of meat consumed in Japan in various forms, but not typically prepared or presented in this style except when presented as foreign. I think they eat a lot of beef bowls, sukiyaki, shabu shabu and that kind of thing, but not so much steak on the hibachi, which I see is actually a misnomer, since it's supposed to be a heating device, not a cooking device.

Well, let's see. Yes, Japanese people eat fish in sushi/sashimi style, but more often, I eat fish that's been under the broiler. The skin gets crispy, but the meat's yummy. Eat it in ponzu sauce with a little bit of grated daikon and a bowl of rice. Yum. But not what you would get in "restaurant style" Japanese food.

Hibachi, sukiyaki, teppanyaki, onabe, shabu shabu---those have beef in them. In my family, and I suspect in most Japanese families, hibachi is rarely eaten at home. That's restaurant food. You can have fish, chicken, shrimp, or meat cooked on a teppan (which is actually what the hibachi in Benihana should be called). You can cook anything on a teppan.

Drachen Jager said:

I can't think of any way you could cook fish that you could not cook red meat.

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That was my reaction too. A better joke might be encouraging someone who doesn't like fish to order mahi-mahi, which can be easily mistaken for meat if cooked certain ways, like with soy sauce that changes the color. Salmon also can be easy to mistake for meat, especially if there's barbeque sauce or salsa involved.

cornflake said:

I don't quite understand what you mean it to mean.

You can cook a meat (be it beef, fish, chicken, whatever - flesh), in a variety of ways.

You can poach, saute, broil, grill, fry, bread, etc., etc., etc. You can make veal picatta, chicken picatta, fish picatta, etc. You can make fish en papillote, or chicken or...you see where I'm going with this.

Japanese fish is often served sashimi-style, which you can do with beef but not chicken, but it's not to do with cooking. It's also, afaik, as I'm a vegetarian, served poached or broiled in/with a miso or some other such. So could anything else be.

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You can even get chicken sashimi in Japan....