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Making Sushi with Gillian

January 21st, 2010 mattdaddy

Since Gillian has been diagnosed with Celiac disease, we’ve been trying to find ways to get her to eat more diverse foods than gluten free(gf) mac and cheese and gf grilled cheese and grilled chicken. I knew enough to download a translated card from the Celiac Disease foundation that listed the instructions and asked a few questions in several languages so the guys at our japanese restaurant could understand and make her sushi. They did, and she loved it.

Problem is, it’s really expensive. So for the holidays, Gillian bought me a sushi kit – a book, some implements and a wish to make it with me. I’m gonna say no to that face? Don’t think so.

	First things first. Pour the rice into a big bowl that isn’t white. Why not white? The first thing you have to do is make sure that you rinse the rice to pull off any excess starch and ‘dust’. Put the rice into the bowl and put in water so it’s totally submerged and then some.
	You’ll need to mix it around so you get all of it ‘clean’. Gillian kinda liked this part
	Once it’s relatively clear, you’re good to go. Drop it in the rice cooker. If you don’t have one, google what you’ll need to do. My roomie from college gave me the one we used and we love it.
	Gillian likes cooked shrimp so we decided on a cucumber, mango, and shrimp roll. Yeah, she’s nuts for mango. The key to cooking the shrimp is to use wooden skewers. You slide it into the shrimp, trying to keep it inside the shell, but not piercing the shrimp itself. The skewers are so when you cook them, they don’t curl up. Curled shrimp is pretty freakin hard to put in a roll from what I hear. We got jumbo shrimp from the Wegmans counter, so they were iced, but not frozen. Get them de-veined too. eww.
	If you’ve eaten at enough sushi places and watched them (plus a lot of Iron Chef), you know that you don’t chop up the cucumber. You pare it like you’re peeling an apple, just make it one continuous sheet of cucumber. I managed to get 3/4 of the cuke peeled like this before I broke it Gillian peeled the skin off initially and then sliced the sheet into strips, of course eating the ones that were too thick
	For those of you who have made sushi before, I know, this looks really sloppy. KEY NOTE TO MAKING SUSHI – WAIT FOR THE RICE TO COOL. I almost burned all the skin off the tips of my fingers spreading this out. Hot sushi also tends to melt or tear the nori. Here we have the bamboo mat with a sheet of nori (seaweed) on top spread with the rice. Don’t do it all the way to the edge, leave about 1/5 of the roll free so you don’t have too much. Another key note – spread it thin or it’ll be one big ball of rice. The other thing I learned is that my ingredients are too close to the middle, needed to bring them towards me a bit more.
	Here’s my first roll, cut into pieces. Key Note: hot/warm rice doesn’t cut well. Also: having a container with 4 parts water, 1 part rice-wine vinegar that you can dip the knife into is ESSENTIAL. As you can see, it’s not cut well here. Knife was plenty sharp, I was pushing down too hard, and the rice got too sticky on the knife.
The first roll is finished: Matt & Gillian make sushi from Matt Cushing on Vimeo.
	As you can tell by the thumbs up, I got better as I went along
We’re done: We’re done making Sushi from Matt Cushing on Vimeo.