Sushi night! January 11, 2009

I have to apologize that there’s no “how-to” this week.

My boyfriend and I went to see about 12 apartments between Saturday and Sunday. We’d just wait for phone calls, go see an apartment, get a phone call and go see another apartment, and repeat… I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to find an apartment in NY (well, maybe you can) but it’s unbelievably stressful. I should know because I’ve moved 11 times in 14 years. It’s going okay so far, we just hope that we can find a good place soon!

Instead of a how-to, I’ll just post pictures of our sushi night!

My boyfriend and I sometimes have a sushi night. All you need is rice, rice vinegar, sugar, fresh fish and a sharp knife. You can find TONS of “how to make sushi online”, so I’m not gonna go into describing it. But if there’s an Asian supermarket nearby, pick up “Tamanoi Sushinoko.” (You can find it online too) This is a sushi rice mix powder, and if you’ve never made sushi before, it’s so much easier to make sushi-rice with this powder. Usually, you mix rice with rice vinegar+sugar+salt, but if you don’t dry rice well when you’re mixing it, the rice gets really watery and loose and it makes it harder to make sushi.

The package looks like this. It says "Tamanoi Sushinoko" in English.

Salmon and tuna blocks are about $6~7 each (for 2 X 5 X 1 1/2), and we only used half of each block or less. So for this whole plate, we spent about $7 + rice! We were so in mood for sushi when we made this, and we even made some California rolls.

Of course, we couldn’t finish the sushi.

Back in Japan, I used to have a sushi night when I was little. My grandma would cut the sashimi block, and I remember each sashimi piece was HUGE, but it was also so much fun! Well, sushi may not be for kids in the U.S., but it is really easy and fun and you can save a lot of money if you’re a sushi lover.

By the way, don’t buy shrink wrapped tuna… They aren’t good for sushi. They are dyed with food coloring to make them look redder. (shudder)
When you see sashimi block in a store, it may look really small, but you’ll only need 1/4 inch of it for each sushi. You’ll be surprised how many sushi you can make with one sashimi block.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be done with our apartment hunt this week, so I can do a how-to next week!