Sushi Making with the Little Sis

Hello Friends! This post is very overdue.... I've started my third year of medical school and it's super busy! I'm loving my three month internal medicine rotation, but I'm finding that there is hardly any time left over between 6 days a week in the hospital for 12 hours a day, church, and time with the hubby. Still, I'm going to do my best to try and keep up! Thanks for understanding!!

Over my brief summer break, Andrew and I traveled back to Seattle to spend time with family. We also visited my grandparents at Priest Lake in Idaho (my most favorite place in the entire world). While there, my little sister Lisa and I decided it would be fun to make sushi. Let me just say, we've never made sushi before, but we volunteered to make dinner for the whole fam, so the pressure was on.... Fortunately for us, it was so easy and turned out great! The family loved it, and we had a super fun time preparing dinner together!

Here's how we made our sushi:

Supplies:

Bamboo sushi mat (you can find these at most Asian markets)

Saran wrap to cover your sushi mat

Bowl of water to rinse your hands while rolling

Bowl of rice vinegar

Ingredients:

3-4 cups sushi rice, cooked as package indicates

10 Nori seaweed sheets

10 Imitation crab meat sticks/blocks, cut in half length wise

1 avocado, peeled and sliced thinly, lengthwise

1 cucumber, peeled and sliced thinly, lengthwise into matchstick thick pieces

1 carrot (optional), peeled and sliced thinly, lengthwise into matchstick thick pieces

Wasabi paste

Soy sauce

(*we also made sushi rolls with smoked salmon and cream cheese instead of the imitation crab. You can also use sesame seeds, but the ones in the spice cupboard at the cabin were from the 1980's... so we omitted this step.)

Steps:

1. Cover sushi mat with saran wrap on both sides. This helps the rice not stick while you make your roll.
2. Place all ingredients on a cutting board or plates on your work surface so you can assemble quickly.
   
                
                    
3. Cut/break seaweed sheets in half (if you want fatter/thicker rolls, don't do this step)
4. Place seaweed on half of the sushi mat closest to you.
5. Dip your fingers in the bowl of water and spread some sushi rice evenly over your seaweed. It can be tricky because the rice is sticky, but the water helps quite a bit. (Notice Lisa's sticky fingers... and her lovely nail polish ;) gotta love summer!)
   
                    
6. Dip your fingers in the bowl of rice vinegar and dab the top of the rice.
   
                                    
7. Once your seaweed is covered with the rice, flip the entire seaweed/rice over so that the seaweed side is toward you and the rice is on top of the saran wrap.
8. Place all your ingredients onto the seaweed, starting at the edge closest to you.
   
                    
   
                    
   
                    
9. Roll your sushi, using the bamboo sushi mat. As you start rolling, press firmly along the entire roll to make it tight. Lift up on the mat as you roll, and continue rolling/pressing until you have rolled it into a complete sushi roll. It sounds complicated, but it's not... check out the pictures below, or check out some great videos online :)

 

    10.  Wrap up the sushi roll in some saran wrap until you are ready to cut and serve.

    11.  Proceed with making all the rest of the rolls. 

Feel free to mix up ingredients. We made a variation of the California roll... we're calling ours the Priest Lake roll. We also used some smoked salmon and cream cheese to make another variety. So fun and so tasty!

(Of note, Lisa and I, being musicians, made up a song about our sushi making. It is sung to the tune of "Bamboo" by Peter Paul and Mary... if you'd like to know the lyrics to our tune, let me know and I'll see what I can do...)

Here's the recipe as a JPEG to print:

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