What I eat, apparently

Hey look! I made real sushi! Not lazy sushi! Yay!

I totally have the wrong type of rice. The sweet rice was right by the short grain rice at the store, and I was all like ‘Hey! Instead of getting the rice I’m supposed to get, I’ll get the one right beside it instead!’. So I did. And it’s really glutinous and sticky. To think, way back in my early sushi-making days it was a hard and arduous task to get the sushi rice to be ’sticky’. It involved strategic soaking of the rice, painful measurements of the water, and much arduous squishing around with a large spoon or other such device to get the rice to desired stickiness. It’s gotten much easier since then, mind you, but with this sweet rice, I don’t even really have to touch it for it to be sticky!

Anyhow, here’s a bit of technical detail about the process of preparing the ingredients: I hacked up a bunch of crap.

The cucumber and carrot went easy. The avocado, being perfect consistency (something else I was hellish at determining back in the day) also went easy. That egg was a real bastard, though.

First off, I was out of white rice, so I mixed brown rice up into the egg instead, which is why the egg is funny colors. I really hate cleaning frying pans, so I use the fabulous ‘boil the egg in a ziplock bag in a pot full of water’ technique, which is generally brilliant. Doesn’t work so well when there’s sugar in there too, though, as the sugar just wanted to sink to the bottom, and scald onto the bottom of the pan, and consequentially tear when I lifted the bag to check on the egg’s progress. Let’s just say some of the egg had not finished boiling yet and decided to escape. My strainer is my buddy.

So then I rolled it all up into delightful friendly tubes, as can be seen below. The ‘lack of white sugar’ problem also lent it’s coloring to the rice as well, as you can see. Brown sugar actually tastes fine in sushi, the aesthetics are the problem, I suppose.

Then comes the slicing, and the dicing, with the hackin’ of the knives. And so forth. All producing this delightful crop of fishless tasties:

I actually would have had them include meat if I’d been able. But you see, Drew is repulsed by both crab and shrimp, so they’re out. Hell if I can find tuna at Kroger anymore, so that’s out (I was apparently too lazy to check any other grocery store). Salmon in raw form just doesn’t do much for me, so none of that. And I’m still not completely sure which white fish would really work well in sushi. Oh, and eel would have been fabulous, but the Tan-A Asian grocery store was also beyond the scope of my laziness. Alas. Egg is kinda like future meat, so I guess that works.

Anyhow, i made it all purdy:

All of which became an attempt at a romantic dinner. Or at least, imagine that there wasn’t a blinding flash used in this picture below, and that the table isn’t all scratched up, and that the drill isn’t there. Or something like that.

If there’s two things I’m good at, it’s eating sushi and being lazy. Thusly, we have Sushi Pile, Part Deux. Now, I just made a sushi pile a little while ago, therefore I should warn you in advance that this post will be repetitive and uninteresting. Sorry, but that’s just how I roll. This one, however, comes with bling.

It’s the lens flare that adds the flavor.

Did you know that you can get 5 lb bags of wasabi at your local Asian grocery store? I suggest that you get on that this instant, lest you be stuck with boring sushi when the Apocalypse arrives, or the zombie uprising, for that matter. I know that when I’ve got 287923443 undead beating down my door, my primary concern will definitely be how to get that extra zing in my nigiri!

I’m gonna make real sushi one of these days, I promise. Girl scout’s honor!

Have you ever had one of those days where you just really really wanted sushi but couldn’t quite justify the cost? This is why it really comes in handy that I know how to make sushi. And I really had planned to make sushi, too. However, when you’re missing a key ingredient (nori, aka the seaweed paper that sushi gets rolled in) and are too lazy to go buy it, the sushi just ain’t gonna happen. Albeit, one who is too lazy to go buy an ingredient is certainly too lazy to actually make said sushi, but let’s just ignore that fact for now.

So instead I just made all the ingredients for sushi and dumped them in a pile. Turned out I was out of sushi rice, but I just used jasmine instead (jasmine = best rice ever) and it was quite delightful. I fried the egg + sugar that always looks so nice and folded in nigiri rolls, but, quite inevitably, it suceeded looking only like mutated scrambled egg. So much for my egg frying skills. But no matter, it all piled happily with the avocado and carrot, as well as delightful furikake. Furikake is the Rice Seasoning of the Gods, it is flavorful and makes even plain rice absolutely delicious. And then came the shrimpies!

In any case, here’s the final result.

Lazy sushi for a lazy me. But, so good.

I really need to get some (nori, that is).

P.S. If you want to be super cost efficient, it’s infinitely cheaper to buy nori in a 100 sheet count pack from your local Asian food store then from the fancy schmancy international aisle of your local grocery store, where they might charge the same price for only 10 sheets.