Birthday Party for ViviAnne

Tuesday was ViviAnne's birthday. We had a nice party for her at our house with home made sushi, chocolate icebox cake, and the movie Juno. A bunch of people came over including family and friends. The sushi rolling was fun, a couple of people had never done it before so it was nice to see them learning how to do it. So for today I will post our sushi recipe that we used last night.


Some essential tools:
sushi rolling mat
julieanne peeler
sharp knife

How to do the rice:
2 cups sushi rice
2 cups water

Wash the rice in cold water and combine rice and water in pot. Bring to boil with occasional stirring and then reduce heat to simmer and cover with lid for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand for 10 minutes.

How to do the sushi sauce:
5 Tbsp rice vinegar
5 Tbsp Murine
3 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp salt

Combine in small sauce pan and heat over medium heat until sugar and salt are dissolved. Once rice has set for 10 minutes, drizzle sauce over rice and let rice cool in fridge for a half hour.

What to put in your sushi? Any of the following
Cucumber, carrot, crab (imitation or real), green onion, avocado, raw tuna, raw salmon, pickled radish or cucumber are just a few.
The big thing here is slicing the different fillings so that they are long and narrow, shoot for a 1/16 to 1/8 of thickness and about 4-5 inches long. The best thing to use is a Julianne peeler in my opinion. This is a great activity to do with older kids to get them to help out in the dinner cooking process.

How to roll'em:
Have all your ingredients spread out in front of you. Also fill a small bowl with rice vinegar. Take a sheet of seaweed wrap and place it rough side up on the mat. The mat is bamboo and you want the bamboo running across and not up and down, when you place a sheet of seaweed on the mat, you want the lines in the seaweed to run up and down. Use your fingers to put a little bit of vinegar on the wrap, make sure you put a thin line of vinegar across the top. This will help seal the wrap when you are ready to roll it. Put about 4 Tbsp of rice on the sheet. Dip your fingers in the rice vinegar and push the rice on the wrap out to the sides so that there is a thin layer of rice covering the wrap (maybe one to two grains thick). Use your hand and make a 1/4 inch wide trough in the rice on the bottom third of the wrap. Place your choice of thinly slice veggies or meat into the trough. Now using the mat, roll the wrap up so that it looks like a large cigar. Place on a cutting board and using a sharp knife, cut the roll into approximately 8 pieces. Eat one of the ends for fun. Repeat the wrapping process until you run out of rice. You will probably get from 6-8 rolls out of 2 cups of rice.

Some popular combinations are:
Avocado-cucumber-carrot
Avocado-tuna-carrot
Avocado-crab-cucumber
Crab-green onion-carrot
Crab-pickled radish-cucumber
Tuna-cucumber-carrot
Salmon-cucumber

Have fun with it!