Not Garden Related: Sharing a Recipe

This post has nothing to do with gardening and raising food to use in my recipes. I'm posting this because it was so much fun to do and thought I'd share it. Yesterday was my 2nd year wedding anniversary and to celebrate, the hubs and I made sushi!  I always thought sushi was too hard to make, but my sister taught me how to do this and it's really easy.  Just a bit of prep work.  We received this Sushi Book and Kit as a present some time ago and it's a great tool.  It comes with a book with recipes, a bamboo mat, a rice mold and 2 little bowls for soy sauce.  There are some key ingredients you'll need to make sushi, these can be purchased at an Asian Market or online.
1. Nori - Japanese dried seaweed
2. Sushi Rice - You have to use sushi rice because of the sticky quality it has
3. Rice Wine Vinegar
4. Wasabi

Click on image to see the book/kit on Amazon.

Other ingredients you'll need are sugar, cucumber, avocado, and some kind of protein like sashimi grade fish, eel, shrimp or crab meat.  Note: for raw fish, it's really important to use sashimi grade not only for the taste but the quality of the fish. For the Eel, I buy the pre-packaged, pre-seasoned japanese style eel.  It's pre-cooked, you just need to re-cook it in the oven for 10 minutes.  For shrimp, it must be cooked.  A trick I use is that I bamboo skewer peeled shrimp, and season with salt and pepper and cook in a skillet a few minutes on both side.  I skewer the shrimp to keep them straight when cooked.  If you didn't skewer it, it will curl when cooked.

To make the rice, measure out 2 cups of sushi rice and 2 1/2 cups of water. I cook this in a rice cooker because I am terrible at cooking rice over the stove. When the rice is cooked, scoop the rice into a bowl and add 1/2 cup of rice vinegar, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of soy sauce. Mix well. Put the rice in the mold to make these square rice shapes. Note: I keep a bowl of water on the counter to keep my hands wet while working with the rice, it's very sticky.

Cut the Nori seaweed into 1/4 inch strips, lay one strip down, then the rice.  Add a tiny bit of wasabi then a slice of sashimi grade tuna or whatever fish, eel, shrimp you are using.  Roll the seaweed strip around everything so it keeps it together.

 

This is what it should look like when it's assembled.

For rolls, you'll need to use a bamboo mat.  I like to put my mat in a large ziploc bag, this makes for easier cleanup.  Use a whole sheet of nori, and pat rice all over the nori in a thin layer.

Make sure you cover the entire nori sheet.

 

Then add whatever ingredients you want to put in the rolls.  Like for this one, I added eel and cucumber.   Then roll it up with the bamboo mat pressing it while you roll, roll away from you until it's a log.  Slice into 6 pieces with a clean knife.

To make spicy tuna, you'll need to make a spicy sauce and add cut up pieces of tuna. For the sauce, combine 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise with 1 tablespoon of sriracha hot sauce.  Mix the sauce with the chopped tuna until well incorporated then make the rolls like above with the spicy tuna.

Here is the platter of sushi when we were finished!

The only thing left to do is to sit down and enjoy the meal!  Delicious!