Sushi

On Wednesday night we shifted the cooking to our friend Jeanette. I can count on one hand the number of times we have turned cooking over to someone else, but Jeanette is a good bet. She and her friend Andrew opened a fusion restaurant in Shelby called Nifen. It was an excellent restaurant because of the food and the atmosphere and we were sorry when it closed in 2005. Both Jeanette and Andrew have remained friends of ours and we have actually cooked for them a couple of times. That's a little scary, but I can always count on corn and cornbread to make them happy.

This time Jeanette did the cooking because the boys wanted to learn to make sushi. All summer long, David and Jay have been talking about learning to make sushi. This was out of my range, so I called for a professional and Jeanette came to the rescue. She gave me a grocery list and she brought a few items from an Asian specialty store. There are two things that you have to have for making sushi - sushi rice because it is stickier than regular rice and something to wrap the sushi like seaweed or soy paper. I prefer soy paper, but we couldn't find it, so we used nori (seaweed) wraps. Once you have sushi rice and a sushi wrap, you can add most anything to make sushi.

We decided to make California rolls. The sushi rice was pressed firmly onto the wrap, Jeanette added strips of avocado, crab or shrimp and rolled into a tight roll. You can use a bamboo roller to make really tight rolls, but Jeanette did it with her bare hands. After all, she is a professional! After rolling the sushi, Jeanette sliced it into medium thin slices and arranged it artfully on a platter.

She also made sashimi which is rice pressed into little football shapes (a job she turned over to David IV) and covered with tuna, grouper or Scottish salmon. We had four sauces - Ponzu, Ginger, Shrimp, Soy. We also had pickled ginger and really hot Wasabi to top off our sushi. The kick of Wasabi can make your nose sting and your eyes water. And it always makes me laugh, because it reminds me of John Belushi on the old Saturday night live skit - W-A-S-A-B-I!

It turns out that making sushi is alot like making anything else. Once you have the basics down, you can tweak it with various ingredients and amounts that suit you. Learning to arrange it artfully on the platter may take a little practice!