Sushi with the Simpsons

I love when we have sushi night! It’s a skill that takes much practice, which means the more we make it, the better we get. Oh the first time was just rather a disaster, but not so much that we haven’t been trying ever since. I finally felt confident enough to get some snapshots of the process to share. This was probably the fifth or so time we’ve done this at home. The first time was a rice disaster, the second a Sushi Su disaster, the third and fourth went pretty well, and this time ahhh I think it was the best yet. I can’t wait til the next time!

Now for all you peeps out there sticking your noses in the air, I have one question… have you ever HAD sushi? And a California roll just doesn’t count. Kyle was rather spectacle of it at first as well, but when I took him to his first Sushi restaurant in Winter Park, Colorado – he instantly saw what I was talking about, and has been a fan ever since.

I gathered all our supplies and put them on the little island thing in our kitchen. We don’t ever sit here unless we’re making sushi, so we pull in the chairs from the dining room and pull them right up to our work area. I have the rice and the rice cooker, the seaweed – wasabi – and ginger; all necessities. I have the supplies for making the Sushi Su: rice vinegar, sake (Japanese wine) and sugar. Sushi Su is a mixture added to the rice to make it a little stickier.



Don’t mind the snowflake placemats, lol. We just use plastic ones because they are easier to work with and it just so happens the plastic placemats we used this time were our snowflake ones. We have our little soy saucer, chop sticks, bamboo rolling mat. You can kind of see a ketcup bottle there in the middle. That is the spicy mayo (just made from Olive Oil Mayo and chili paste)

We have our fillings of the evening which consist of cucumber and avocado:


I thought this was pretty cool, when I started to cut up the cucumber… it began beading out water:


And then our STAR ingredient…. The tuna!


This little ten dollar tuna patty gets us about three rolls a piece. Then we make a few veggie rolls as well.
MMMMmmmm! This is the best part. We usually either get tuna or salmon. Although one night I made a mixture of the spicy mayo and chopped up imitation crabmeat for spicy crap rolls which was pretty fantastic as well, but Tuna is number one in my book. We have had a rather hard time finding fresh fish at any other place than Whole Foods. I keep checking Byerly’s (a fancy grocery store here) but they never have anything, I think I give up after this last visit. But Whole Foods is loyal and always has either Tuna or Salmon when we look for it there, it’s over where they make the sushi, so we know it’s fresh!

Once the rice is finished in the rice cooker, we add the Sushi Su and fold it all together.


Then we take a nice heap of rice and spread it on the seaweed sheet:


And LOAD it up with the goods! Kyle likes to put a line of the spicy mayo on his, but my mouth just can’t take that fire. This one ended up being too full and I had to take the avocado out, but it looks rather yummy, doesn’t it?


Now here comes the tricky part, rolling it up. This picture is actually one of the better jobs. It’s hard to get the circle to close, instead a lot of the time we end up with a gap between the two pieces of seaweed. We’ve even tried using a full piece (going against what they recommend – the half piece) and it still doesn't work perfect, so I don’t think it’s the size of the seaweed. I think it’s the person behind the bamboo mat. ;-)

By the way: the bamboo mat, you need to put saran wrap around it or you'll have a sticky mess with rice getting stuck between the little grooves.


After it’s rolled it’s time to cut it up. We make sure we have a sharp knife and we use a santoku knife with a hollow edge, because it seems to work the best. We keep a warm (well it was warm when we start… but ends up room tempature) towel next to the knife to keep it clean of sushi guts, lol (mainly the avocado smears on the knife).


And WALA! Sushi it is! I call this one “Spicy Tuna Volcano”


I gave it that name because, remember I said that other roll was too big and I had to take the avocado out? Well I ended up just cutting it up and placing it on top with a little dot of spicy mayo. It’s ‘Spicy’ because of the spicy mayo (duh), ‘Tuna’ because, well there is tuna in it, and ‘Volcano’ because it shares many similar letters with the word avocado :-) Clever yes I know.

Once it’s on the plate it doesn’t last long, we grab our chopsticks, dip a piece in our wasabi/soy saucer and shovel in! We make our own rolls, but every once in a while we’re share. I let Kyle try one of my ‘Spicy Tuna Volcano’ mainly because I was just so proud of it.




Thanks for reading!
________________________________________________________