Sushi!

July 18 2010 - Toby 20 months

su·shi

 noun \ˈsü-shē also ˈsu̇-\

Definition of SUSHI

: cold rice dressed with vinegar, formed into any of various shapes, and garnished especially with bits of raw seafood or vegetables

I'm not sure what prompted me to want to make sushi. I had tried it for the first time while at college, after years of squirming at the idea of raw fish - I didn't realize that that's not what Sushi truly is.

Raw fish is a delicacy and an aspect to sushi, but the word sushi actually means seasoned rice. After that base you can literally pair anything you want with it.
I had made a friend online who is a chef and we had talked about getting together to cook something fabulous, because I was just tapping into my foodie side and wanted to learn everything.
I had decided, for whatever reason, that I wanted to learn to make sushi rolls because it was always something that seemed too intimidating to try on my own.
Needless to say that get together never happened, but here I sat with this bug in my brain about desperately wanting to learn how to make sushi rolls. I finally ended up watching endless youtube videos about how to make it, went and bought everything I needed, gritted my teeth, and decided I was going to do this.

It's surprisingly hard to find a good 'how to' sushi video. I watched a lot and took bits and pieces form each one. I also read the comments under the video for critique. This one is pretty easy to follow, although when I make it I leave about a 2 inch 'edge' on it instead of the 1 centimeter that she does here.

Ingredients bought! Organic sushi nori (toasted seaweed sheets), yellow and red pepper, cucumber, imitation crab strips (which I later found out contain egg because I'm dumb and didn't read the ingredients to begin with), and sauteed shitakii mushrooms.

Success!! Red pepper, cucumber and mushroom rolls; and yellow pepper, cucumber and crab rolls.

And mini sushi for Toby to try! For this I cut a piece of nori in half and then made the sushi the same way.

I handed Toby a fork, but then he wanted to know what the funny stick things were that I had, which were clearly more exciting than his fork. So I handed them to him...

...And he actually made them work!....sort of...

The first few he put in his mouth he promptly spit out because the taste of the nori was new to him. I ended up picking a few apart for him so he could eat the pepper and the cucumber and the rice. By the end I think he ate a few whole pieces.

Big smiles for fun food!!

Keep eating!!!