I am not perfect.

In case you were wondering. 😉

I make mistakes, sometimes. Okay, lots of the time.

I was at Mitsuwa the other day, looking for sustainable seafood. (I would have ordered something from I Love Blue Sea, except it was Saturday, and I wanted to make sushi the next day, so there’s no way I would have gotten it in time.)

So I pull up the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch iPhone App. Standing in front of the refrigerated shelves of sashimi, I went to the “Sushi” section of the application, and sorted it by rating. Because I figured, I only want to buy seafood with the best rating, right?

So matching up the recommendations from the list to the options on the shelves, I saw izumidai – tilapia. It appeared to have a good rating, so I went ahead and bought it.

What I didn’t realize until I got home, was that the good rating was only for tilapia farmed in the US. The tilapia I got was from Taiwan. Shoot. That’s the worst type.

Cringe.

(Dear Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch… it would be really great if you could always keep the different ratings for each type of fish grouped, even when we sort it by best rating – so that when I look and see that a type of fish from one region is great, I’ll also see that that same type of fish from other regions aren’t so great, and can therefore make better informed decisions. Thanks, Allison)

Okay, so that was a big mistake on my part. (And I’m owning up to it so hopefully you won’t make the same mistake!) But even though I screwed up, it seems like it would be even worse to waste the fish when I’ve already bought it… right?

So we came up with a few different ways to use the tilapia, the first of which is a poke inspired by the poke we ate two years ago when we visited Hawaii. And if you can find tilapia farmed in the US, I really recommend this!