Cooking Adventures

A few days ago, I was at the store with my sister, intending to buy ingredients for a fried rice recipe I had come across online that sounded good. After pricing out a few of the ingredients, I decided to wait until I find shrimp on sale (because I was surprised at how expensive it is). I did, however, notice that sushi rice was pretty inexpensive when I was looking at jasmine rice for the fried rice recipe. On impulse, I bought the sushi rice and some SPAM because I had been interested in making SPAM musubi.

Here's my SPAM musubi finished product

 

The next day, I decided to also get the ingredients to make California rolls. I had sushi rice, why not make sushi, right? California rolls are pretty simple, so I decided to start there, no raw fish to worry about. I went to the store to buy rice vinegar, nori (roasted seaweed used in making sushi), avocado, cucumber and imitation crab meat.

Then I had to go to three different stores to find a bamboo mat for rolling the sushi. I had looked up online where to buy one, but had no luck actually figuring out where it was in the first two stores. I should have started out at the local Asian food market because their nori was also half the price I had paid for it elsewhere.

When I went home, I decided to make SPAM musubi first because it was going to be the simpler of the two planned dishes. The longest part of the recipe was cooking the sushi rice, but it came out pretty well. It's a very sticky rice, so some of it was stuck to the bottom of the pan, but I had enough to make my musubi. The SPAM was sliced and fried up with a little bit of soy sauce and sugar. Then, assembling them was done by placing the strips of nori and forming the rice into compressed piles about the size of the SPAM patties and sprinkling it with furikake (a rice seasoning). Once, the nori was wrapped around, they were ready to go! They turned out really good and I'll definitely be making them again.

The successful California rolls

I was more concerned about how well the sushi was going to turn out because California rolls are made inside out - with the rice on the outside and nori on the inside. I figured, if nothing else, I'd have piles of California roll to eat with a spoon instead of a neat little roll to eat by hand. I spread the rice across the nori and sprinkled a little furikake over it because I didn't have roasted sesame seeds, then flipped the whole thing over (which was dicey, but I did it).

After placing the inside ingredients on the nori, it came time to roll up the sushi. I managed to get it rolled up pretty easily, but then when I unrolled the bamboo mat, the actual hardest part of making the sushi came into play: cutting it into smaller pieces. The first roll mostly fell apart, probably because I hadn't quite rolled it tight enough. The second roll managed to produce some nice, photo worthy pieces. I shared a few pieces with my family who said it tasted just like any California roll they'd had at a restaurant.

Here's the beauty shot

So, the bottom line to all of this is if there's something out there that you've been wanting to cook, but were afraid...go for it! It might be fun, it might be a disaster, but you never know until you try. That lesson can easily apply to a lot of other things, and I'm sure it's one you've heard before. Still, it's important to remind ourselves that it's okay to go outside your comfort zone once in a while, even if it's in a small way like trying to make sushi. Worst case scenario, you have a big mess in your kitchen and a pile of sushi ingredients to eat.