The Art of Roleplaying Podcast Lives!
Yay! I'm back on the podcasting wagon again...
http://www.theartofroleplaying.com/
There’s nothing like a log splitter running outside your window…
...when you want to record an intro for your podcast, RIGHT NOW.
I never thought I’d eat sushi…
But tonight we made sushi at home. Just a few weeks ago, I hadn't tried it because I'm not a big fan of fish, and I'm not inclined to try it raw. Then I discovered that sushi != raw fish, and a local Japanese semi-fast-food place I like makes it with cooked shrimp and crab, in addition to the more usual raw fish. So I tried it.
So... a handful of weeks later, and I find myself in the mood for sushi... for lunch, when I work in a little town that doesn't even have a McDonald's, let alone a place where raw fish is considered the norm. I'm wanting to go for sushi all the time. And my craving for sushi grew to the point that Valentine's Day will be (when we manage to schedule our belated dinner) a sushi bar, I'm scoping out sushi bars in San Francisco where I'll be for my brother's wedding in April, and I bought a book about making sushi. And I've even thought about trying raw fish.
So tonight, we made sushi. No maki-zushi (rolls) because my wife couldn't find the bamboo mat to roll them up with, and after discovering just how sticky the rice is (sticking to everything else more than it does itself), it's probably better that I didn't tackle it. So we had nigiri-zushi (finger sushi), which wasn't quite as pretty as what they've got at the sushi place. But it was tasty.
Things I'd do differently...
- Plan a little further ahead so we had a few more ingredients. We'd been collecting the stuff, but we didn't have avocado, cucumber, and such. But we had the essentials... seafood, rice, wasabi.
- Understand that in Engrish, "No need to rince," on the rice package means "rinse twenty times or until you're too tired to go on."
- Realize, when not finding what we want on the shelf, that "dashi" is the key word in "dashi kombu." What we got was something-or-other kombu and worked, but wasn't dashi, per se. Not that I could tell the difference between our sushi rice and the rice at the sushi place, but I think "something-or-other" means "shredded." Picking all the shredded seaweed off of the top of the rice was a pain.
- Get better shrimp. I like good shrimp, but I don't like any seafood that smells or tastes "fishy" and this shrimp was fishy. In part, I think, because they were large enough to butterfly for the nigiri-zushi instead of being little chop-me-up shrimp.
- Know where my bamboo mat is. One should always know where one's bamboo mat is.
Still, we had fun, we enjoyed the food, we enjoyed watching the daschund run away from wasabi. We enjoyed various adults forgetting that they used their fork to dab wasabi before eating something else.
I'm looking forward to the real sushi bar experience. I've been missing out for too long. :)