yard sale sushi.

There are lots of things that I have never purchased at a yard sale. For the most part, that's because I've never seen those things at a sale or I didn't need one at the time. I have never bought a car, a mattress, or eyeglasses at a yard sale, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't.

Some people have their limits. My ex-boyfriend was particularly appalled by the idea of buying underwear or bathing suits used, though he didn't seem to have such scruples regarding most secondhand goods. He saw me looking at bathing suits in a Goodwill once and told me that he would give me the money to buy a new one. I should have tried to take him up on the offer and see how long his objections to a used suit lasted. I did have a bra that I fished out of the dumpster once.

In any case, I have not yet found my limit. Saturday morning, I was faced with a new question: would I buy sushi from a yard sale?

The answer is yes.

Maybe that's not so odd. Yard sales often happen in combination with bake sales, and it's not so strange to pick up a bag of brownies from a kid at a card table. But sushi can be a little finicky because it so often contains raw fish. Some people don't eat raw fish, period, much less stuff that they can buy along with a pile of 50 cent records. But let me back up and tell how I came to face the question of yard sale sushi.

Every Friday, I make the yard sale plan. This involves searching the classifieds of the local paper and craigslist for sales that look interesting. Usually I'm looking for larger sales put on by churches, schools, or civic organiziations. I plot the addresses in Google Maps and then look for a route that hits the most sales. And then I take that route, also stopping at various sales I happen to see along the way. Last Friday, I saw that there was a sale at the Korean Baptist Church.

Fascinating!

I eagerly marked down the address and made sure it was included on my finished plan. I had dreams of picking up intriguing Korean items for pennies. I just knew that the items for sale would be so obscure and authentic that I couldn't even picture them! Surely this would be a sale to remember. Josh was less enthused, but what did he know?

The sale was outdoors, with long tables set out, the kind that seems to be at every church sale. I got out of the car and immediately noticed the smell: food. To be specific: food fried in sesame oil. I definitely wanted to check out wherever those smells were coming from, but first I would look at the usual yard sale fare. After all, it was 9:00 in the morning.

The stuff on the tables was disappointing to me, but only because I had built it up in my head. These were the things you would see at Anytown Baptist Church, and there was nothing to suggest that the donors were not born and raised in the American South. After a look through the tables, we decided to follow our noses inside.

Once we got into the fellowship hall, it was apparent that the yard sale outside was only the secondary fundraiser. In the middle of the room were half a dozen tables shoved together, piled high with to-go trays of sushi, huge jars of kimchi, and I don't even know what else. A guy handed us menus printed in Korean (presumably) and English and told us that there were free samples for everything they were selling. And indeed, all around the perimeter of the room there were people battering and frying and assembling food to put out on styrofoam plates, ready to be stabbed with a toothpick and sampled. It was way better than the row of samples carts at Sam's Club.

Before we even had a chance to figure out what we wanted to try, a tiny woman accosted us and dragged us over to the nearest fry station. She handed us toothpicks laden with unfamiliar food, explaining that it was like a pancake and would be good with coffee. Before we could say much of anything she was handing us something else, some fried potato and veggie cake, and then it was tempura, and then some spicy rice thing. I wasn't sure if we were getting this kind of attention because we obviously were not all that familiar with Korean food or if everyone was handed samples faster than they could eat them. I was afraid to say anything, like she was actually selling me Korea itself, not various items of its cuisine.

We must have reached the end of the samples, because our guide disappeared as quickly as she had come, ready to give some other unsuspecting shoppers the hard sell. And then I saw the grandmothers.

Along the back of the room were several tables laid end to end. There was an older Asian lady positioned every three feet down the line, resulting in eight or so Korean grandmothers. They were making sushi. Each had a bowl of rice at hand, as well as a set of ingredients sliced long and thin, some we recognized and some we did not. They laid out their mats, covered them with nori and rice, then arranged the long slices of various colored foods in the middle. Then they rolled them tightly, sliced them, and put them on a plate, ready to be collected and packed in trays to be sold. They worked methodically, as if they done this thousands of times at home, while chatting back and forth to each other. I decided without hesitation that I would definitely buy yard sale sushi made by Korean grandmothers.

We bought one tray of 30 generous-sized pieces of sushi for $6, which is an incredible price. We drove back home to put it in the fridge while we hit the rest of the sales on the list. We were also very enamored of the tempura but thought it might be soggy by lunchtime. When we came back around noon, we did not make our traditional post-sale pizza, but unwrapped the saran wrap of our fresh, homemade sushi. I think it was the best sushi I'd ever had and I don't even know what all was in it. The yard sale at the Korean Baptist Church had been something to remember, though not in the way I had expected.

"We should start going to that church," Josh said as we were leaving the sale.

"Uh, I'm not sure if they have services in English. Are you planning on learning Korean?" That's me, always killing dreams by being practical.

"But think of the potlucks," he answered. I did. It was tempting. I could learn to eat with chop sticks if only I could get those sweet Korean grandmothers to cook for me.

It was also worth mentioning that the Koreans were selling haircuts Saturday, too. I did not get a yard sale haircut that day. But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't.