my first attempt at... sushi!

Hubby and I love Nori rolls.  I love all forms of sushi really, as long as it doesn't have avocado (I'm allergic) and I have wanted to make it myself for a long time.  In fact it's on my 10 food things I want to do in 2010 list.

We're so lucky here in Australia these days we have such a good range of multicultural foods in supermarkets.  I was able to pick up the bamboo rolling mat, the sushi rice, mirin and nori seaweed papers all at Coles, and I think for all of it cost me about $10.  I then went to the fishmongers and bought some sushi salmon and some cooked prawns and then when the kids were safely and snugly in bed, hubby and I went about our sushi adventure.

Ingredients: - made 3 large nori rolls (multiplicate depending on how many you'd like to make)

1 cup (uncooked) Sushi Rice (about $3.50 for 1kg)

3 cups water

2 tb Mirin (japanese vinegar - about $2.50 a bottle)

3 Nori seaweed papers (about $2.50 for 10)

You can buy the japanese mayonaise, but I cheated and watered down some regular mayonaise so it was the consistency of tomato sauce.

Apparatus:

1 bamboo rolling mat

glass water on standby

Fillings as you like - we used

Peeled cucumber cut into batons

Cold BBQ chicken thighs (no skin)

Peeled cooked prawns

Sushi grade salmon

Delicate type of lettuce (we used butter)

Method:

Place uncooked rice in 3 cups of cold water, bring to the boil and simmer until cooked.

Rinse rice thoroughly, but delicately as you want to keep the form of the rice, I rinsed three times in cold water.

 Put into the refrigerator to cool completely before using.

Layout all your ingrdients read to use.. and add 2 tb of mirin to your rice, mix through with a spoon.

Now, we tried a couple of methods of putting the rice on the nori seaweed paper - one just making a long oblong (like below and placing the fillings on top, one spreading the rice all over and placing filling in the centre..  both turned out well.  

Make sure you leave about an inch at the far end of your roll without rice/filling and when you are ready to roll - dip your fingers in water and wet that inch.

Use the bamboo mat and fold in the end closest to you in, and then roll as tightly as possible.  We found with more practice got better at this.  (and therefore making Sushi making addictive!)

With a sharp knife, chop them up as you'd like to, or not at all.

These are chicken, mayo and lettuce - see I placed the rice in a column shape with the chicken on top.  Eloise ate these happily for lunch and has asked for more sushi the next day.

This is salmon and cucumber, I spread rice over the entire roll,and then rolled up, made it a little harder to make it tight but I'm sure with practice I'll nail it!  Me and the little girls had these for lunch. Yum.

And this was hubby's first (really good!) attempt at prawn, lettuce and mayo.

We'll definitely make again!  Recommend it  - it would be great thing to do with teens as an activity too.  I'm eager to try some of my faves at the sushi bar - tempura prawn, cooked tuna with corn, I also love inari, must work out what's on/in those.  What's your favourite sushi item at the sushi bar?

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