I'm Samin Nasrat.

And I'm Rishi K. Sherway.

And we're home cooking.

This is episode 27 of our four-part series and episode eight of our eight-part season.

This is the end.

We've come to the end of the year.

Which means we're at the holiday episode.

That's right.

I'm very excited.

Have you eaten or cooked anything good recently?

Lindsay and our friends, Amith and Mindy and myself, we all went to a restaurant in L.A. called Kusaki, an all plant-based Japanese restaurant. Kusaki means plant in Japanese. Okay. They had a bunch of different vegan sushi. But I saw one thing that caught my eye, and I felt a little bit like, I actually asked the waiter, I was like, would it be silly if I ordered a burger here at this place where you make these, like, beautiful plant-based sushi dishes? And he was like, no, no, it's really, really good. And so I said, okay, and so I got this Shishito burger, which was an impossible burger on a brioche bun, and it had cashew cheese, shishito, Shishito, mitaki mushrooms, and a Yuzu kosho aoli.

I don't know what kosho is.

Kosho is when Japanese citruses are turned into like the equivalent of the Japanese version of preserved lemon paste.

But usually there are spices involved too.

Yeah.

Wow. And that was on top of the impossible patio or ground into it?

On top of it. And the craziest thing happened with the combination of all of these things.

The first bite that I had reminded me so much of previously one of my favorite all-time foods as a child,

the sausage McMuffin from McDonald's.

That's so specific and so weird.

I know.

It was such a strange collision of sense memory and the thing that I was eating.

...