SUSHI

My friend Danielle got back from a trip to Australia recently and while she was there she learned to make sushi. I have kind of been obsessed with sushi lately and thought hey, why not give that a try? So, one evening a couple weeks ago I had Danielle and another friend (Amanda) over for a girls night and we all made sushi together. The rice took a while to cool so we didn't end up eating until after 8 pm but whatevs, we had fun together and oh boy was that sushi delicious. What lies ahead is a documentation of our adventurous evening...

We started making the sushi rice (bought at a local Safeway) in my rice cooker. We first cleaned the rice very well, then chucked it in the slow cooker with equal parts (ish) water. When it was done, we mixed sushi vinegar, sugar, and salt together and mixed it up real good so that the sugar and salt would dissolve. Once we had it all mixed up I attempted the "cutting and folding" technique I had seen on youtube while Danielle fanned the rice...

We're by no means sushi experts but our hearts were in the right place.
Danielle judged when the rice had reached the desired consistency (since she was the only one who had done this before) and then we put it in the fridge to cool off. Didn't want to burn our fingers when it came time to assemble the sushi! Photo cred: Amanda :)
We then prepped all our veggies and the crab meat while we had some shrimp tempura in the oven.

 Veggies are prepped, now time to actually make the sushi. I have had sushi mats for a few years but  never knew how to actually use them until this day! You start by laying a piece of seaweed (nori) down on your mat, rough side up and then adding rice like so...

You want the lines in the seaweed to be parallel to the bamboo on the mat (or perpendicular to the string woven through the mat). You also want to leave about an inch of the seaweed exposed as that is what is going to help you seal the roll once you've filled it.
Fill the sushi with your favorite ingredients...

We used shrimp tempura, carrots, cucumbers, avocado, mayo and sprouts in this one. Then use the mat to roll the sushi really tight.

We layered the filling closer to the one end of the sushi so that on the first "roll" the filling would be covered.
Roll the seaweed over once...

Then squeeze tight to compact everything. Keep rolling until you have reached the end of the seaweed then squeeze tight again to seal it.

Hmm, not quite as in focus as I had thought. Oh well! So after the instruction I tried one for myself...

Ready to roll. Literally.

First attempt at sushi = Success!

We made enough rice for eight rolls of sushi. Wowzers. Good thing my husband Brenden was on hand to help us eat all this deliciousness.

One (of two) of our huge plates of homemade sushi. I'm so proud of us girls ;)

Served with more shrimp tempura, edamame beans and soy sauce (naturally). Our other roll had all of the same stuff as the shrimp tempura roll except we used crab pollock meat instead of the shrimp. A few weeks later my husband and I made sushi together and we made a roll that had blanched asparagus, roasted red pepper strips and cream cheese. Oh my word, so good. And with a little bit of wine, I'd say we had a successful girl's night. So there you have it! Until next time...

- A