Gaijin Shusi

Maybe we should have written the more PC "gaikokujin" or "foreign-country person", but we're going with "gaijin". Being that Peta is in a family way, the ocean food web is collapsing and farmed fish and practices are pretty grim, we've been limiting our sea-borne top-predator meals. However, we do enjoy the ritual and taste of sushi and homemade can taste good for a fraction of the price. We've both made makizushi or makimono (the omnipresent rolls that serve as "starter sushi") before, but never together, so we wanted to start slowly. Also, we're not big on Krab, so California rolls are "right out". So why not prawns?

Shrimp Tempura
We used the Tyler Florence recipe at the Food Network site. A major change was using plain ol' AP flour rather than the rice flour that was called for. We also bailed on the sesame oil, fearing that it wouldn't go well with the sushi rice. Who knows how true that is? The seltzer water really lightened the batter up. Getting the shrimp off of the bamboo skewers without rubbing the crispy bits was a real pain though.

Sushi Rice
For the rice, we used the Alton Brown recipe. Jim has used the recipe before for sushi with success and this time was not different. However, the first time he made sushi, he did not realize that one cannot merely use Japanese short-grained rice and call it "good" and that one need not cover the entire sheet of nori with said rice. Bland-tasting, pinwheel lollipop-sized sushi is decidedly not good eats.

Roll It Up
With our new bamboo sushi rolling mat (makisu), half of the rice recipe, nine shrimp, one avocado, two scallions and a section of seeded cucumber, we were able to cover four nori sheets and made shrimp and cucumber rolls; two shrimp and avocado; cucumber, avocado and scallion. The two and three ingredient combination apparently put us into the realm of futomaki rather than the single ingredient hosomaki. The wasabi was the powdered kind that comes in the can. Booooo! It's just horseradish, hot mustard and dye. We'll make the pickled ginger once we run out of the store bought. Can't be that hard! No green tea, but definitely next time.

Jim and Peta

PS: Next stop, gunkanmaki. Jim just like that it means "warship roll" and was invented in 1931. If we were paying attention to Japanese foods, perhaps we might have seen what the parlance of the time was and been able to predict what would happen ten years later?