January 14, 2009
Allison and I Make Amazing Makizushi!!!
This is part IV in our attempt to teach me some tricks in the kitchen that will hopefully help me someday swoon a lady! Since Allison is vegetarian, we're making all our meals as such; our logic is, if I can cook without meat successfully that broadens the overall pool of potential ladys I can cook for! So far we've made tasty thai, delicious pizza pies, and some terrific tofu tacos! This time around we made sushi rolls, also known as Makizushi, with fresh asparagus and avocado. I really like sushi but I've never before tried to make sushi. It turns out, it was really easy! Click here for some photos!
Allison helped a lot by purchasing all of our ingredients ahead of time since I was coming in from out of town. And she had a cool idea for an appetizer: Edamame. In case you're wondering what Edamame is, as I was, its salt-boiled green soybeans still in their pod. You squeeze them out to eat them. They're delicious and a very healthy alternative to potato chips.Allison's parents had given her a jar of authentic wasabi powder which we just added water to making some tear-inducing hot wasabi. I love wasabi. Once while at an authentic Japanese sushi restaurant called Ru-sans that I really like, someone dared me to eat a mouthful of it at one time, which I accepted, and which was a BIG mistake. I do not recommend it; for a moment I thought I might need real medical attention--it was that hot!
Read below if you want to duplicate Allison's vegetarian sushi recipe...
Ingredients: some sheets of nari (dried seaweed, usually available in your grocery store in packs of sheets that are 7x8 inches each), one cup of rice, one third of one third of a cup of apple vinegar (isn't that a ninth?), one tablespoon of sugar, fresh asparagus, an avacado or two, and of course Wasabi!Tools: a pot to boil three cups of water, a pot with a steamer device to steam several asperagus stalks, knife, plate, and of course manners ;-)
(Optional: makisu - a little bamboo mat that aids the rolling of the sushi)
The process is simple:
-start boiling three cups of water, and one third of a third of a cup of apple vinegar (a.k.a. 1/9th), and one teaspoon of sugar-once boiling add the one cup of rice and cook for as long as the package it came in suggests
-steam your stalks of asparagus, (be sure to first break off the bottom inch-or-so of each asparagus stem which otherwise can be tough to eat)
-once rice is steamed, place it in a line down one side of a sheet of nori, then add a stem or two of asparagus and slices of avocado
-using your makisu (or just your hands) roll up the rice, asparagus, and avocado (tip: use a dab of water to make the end of the sheet of nari stay stuck to the rest of the roll
-use a knife to slice the long roll into 6 or 8 smaller rolls
-thats it: enjoy your Makizushi!!!
Labels: Allison teaches Jon how to cook
