Daring Cooks Sushi

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge.

As fond as I am of sushi, and seafood in general, it's not something I would normally make at home as one of the members of the household is allergic to seafood. It's a pain to have to prepare separate meals for the different diets, so I generally choose to cook something that everyone can eat. And I don't care how accommodating you may try to be, sushi without seafood ain't sushi.

The biggest challenge in making the sushi was finding a time when I was well enough and had enough time to get the ingredients and prepare them on the same day. I think I may have had a touch of the H1N1 a few weeks ago, and then I was at the Foodbuzz Festival in San Francisco last week. During the week I don't have enough time to run to the store between classes and then prepare the sushi. And you don't want to make sushi with yesterday's fish.

So I had to put it off to the last moment. I actually made the nigiri sushi and the spiral sushi roll a few days ago when we had a holiday (although I still had a night class to teach). The dragon roll I only got to today.

For the sushi rice, I used Kagayaki Haiga brown rice, which is 100% khoshihikari rice. Although a brown rice with considerably more nutritional value than regular milled rice (more than twice the dietary fiber, three times the magnesium and B6, and ten times the Vitamin E), it appears almost as white as regular short grain rice. The taste was very good.

The recipes are too detailed to include with the post. They are surely available somewhere on the web, or breakdown and buy a book. The nigiri sushi is topped with salmon and ahi tuna. To accommodate my allergic niece, I made the spiral sushi with char siu, grilled green onions, avocado, and roasted red peppers. For the dragon rolls I pan fried salmon and ahi fillets that had been marinated in a teriyaki style sauce.

All of recipes were tasty. Thanks to Audax and Rose for an interesting challenge.

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