California Rolls

Nothing like some sushi to satisfy an exotic urge! Fresh fish, seaweed, wasabi and soy sauce. Yum! We found a good recipe from Alton Brown on Food Network online. This was actually the second dish we made. I had made it before and it was a easy, but ooooh boy was this an adventure…

Looking at this recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/california-roll-recipe/index.html there weren’t a lot of ingredients so we thought it was going to be really cheap.. it was just a matter of finding all these things in a generic grocery store. So we go to the grocery store and get avocado and cucumber and wander over to the seafood section.

We were looking at the crab in total confusion and decided to ask the “Sushi Guy” if he had any crab for sushi and from what we gathered there was none. There was only the special crab he gets shipped in specifically for the sushi he makes in-house. After we fiercely refused to give him $2 in cash for a stick of crab, (Yes, a stick) he thought about it and asked how much sushi we wanted to make and we said about eight rolls because we wanted a lot. He said we would need 2 sticks per roll which would be $36 dollars. Um… yikes! I don’t think so. We said “We’ll just take 5″ and paid $11 dollars for crab. Ok – that was a not in the budget, but let’s move on.

Rice was next. Sushi Guy was nice enough to let us know that we were only to use short grain rice and we did find it after scouring the shelf for about 10 minutes. Sushi Guy also said there was no nori in the store. Luckily, he was wrong and we got two packs for our uber sushi time! Then we got the sesame seeds, rice wine vinegar, wasabi and soy sauce. Total: $42.00. NOT a cheap meal.

We also got a roller for the sushi for $5 at City Market.

Preparation. We were having so much fun and doing a great job. Meanwhile there was cake being served in the lounge (where we were) and then a couple of people wanted to make brownies around us and it was exhausting. Back to the food. We made the rice and toasted the sesame seeds. The rice came out really sticky. I know its called sticky rice, but this was almost like glue! We could barely get it off our fingers when we were putting it on the nori. Assembling was pretty straight forward but tedious. Nori, rice, cucumber, avocado, crab, roll. It was sort of difficult to get the rolls tight and tidy, but eventually we got the hang of it. We didn’t even come close to using all of our ingredients! We only use 1 stick of crab, and had tons of nori left over. We made 4-6 rolls. Had oodles of sushi and barely wanted any because we were so tired. It took hours! It was delicious while it lasted but there was so much sushi that we had to throw away about 10 pieces because the rice got hard and it was gross. We also tossed all the leftover crab because it was stinking up the fridge and there was no chance we wanted to do this again before its short fridge life was over!

Overall, though completely yummy, it was a bit of a fiasco. It’ll probably be a lot easier if we ever do it again since we now have some of the requirements but we probably won’t any time soon. From now on, City Market cali rolls for me!