1. I am incapable of following culinary directions
2. Michelle always wins
And now let us commence!
Yesterday was such a glorious beach day that we decided what better than to have a picnic on the beach....with homemade sushi and homemade strawberry shortcake ice cream! We'd never made either before, but my friends Jane and Eric (not my Eric but hers) are sushi experts and gave us some advice before we started, and I figured that I use our ice cream maker all the time, so how hard could it be to improvise a little?
We invited our fearless friend Michelle over--who had never had sushi and doesn't like fish, but said she'd try both--and Michelle and I got prepared for the meal before Eric got home from work. We purchased a four dollar sushi making kit from Bed, Bath, and Beyond and then took a trip to Whole Foods where we bought such an awesome assortment of fillings for our dinner: sushi grade salmon (very important to the task, Jane and Eric--not mine--said), scallops (which we cooked, because they were not sushi grade), avocado, cucumber, sushi rice (essential), nori (the seaweed paper), mango, kiwi, asparagus, pickled ginger, wasabi, and...surprise ingredient (drumroll)...garlic and cucumber tzakiki (which we didn't plan on using for sushi but wound up using and was amazing!) Michelle even splurged and bought a bottle of pinot blanc, which--for Julie, Julia, and others who keep track of my wine tastes so I don't have to--I liked!
We came home and began chopping with Eric, who had gotten home from work (yippy). We prepared the rice (anyone know why you rinse it under water until the water runs clear, then cook it and add rice vinegar to make it stick?) Once everything was prepared, we took out our bamboo mat and the nori, which has to go shiny side down (something we forgot often, and I think that made it hard for the sushi to stick to itself when we rolled it up, causing both me and Eric to have rolls that, uh, rolled away).
Then the creativity started! We had a wonderful time experimenting and combining ingredients. The tzakiki was an awesome find--it added such flavor to the sushi! But perhaps the biggest surprise was Michelle. Despite the fact that she dislikes seafood and has never had sushi, she loved both and ate so much that she was telling us how stuffed she was! Moreover, her rolls were the only ones that seemed to truly stick together (hence, Michelle wins yet again!)
While all of the sushi prep was going on, I was also assembling ingredients for strawberry shortcake ice cream. Given that I frequently make vanilla ice cream and cookies and cream, strawberry shortcake seemed like the kind of thing one could wing: just puree the strawberries and add in cake instead of cookies to the mixture, right? Mmm.... Well, I did indeed do just that, and for whatever reason, the ice cream didn't solidify in the ice cream maker and was a bit more like, um, a very delicious, strawberry shortcake soup. I suspect that it may be because I didn't cook the strawberry puree, which would have reduced it and made it less liquidy, but to be fair, this has been a trend with our ice cream maker recently, so maybe it's not me!
Regardless, both the sushi and strawberry shortcake soup turned out to be incredible, and the whole meal was topped off with episodes of the Vicar of Dibley, which Michelle gave me as a belated birthday present. What a perfect evening!
Michelle and I with our sushi success!
Eric tasting one of his "sweet" rolls, which included scallop, mango, kiwi, and banana!
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