by Hannah Walton aka The Cheapskate Mom

Making Our Own Sushi : Climbing My Culinary Mount Everest

Hi folks! As you may already know, my hubbie and I don't go out to eat. EVER. We can't afford to right now. Of all the things we miss – we've really been craving sushi. We were talking about this with a friend who has cooked professionally recently – and he said , "I would never try to make my own sushi. It's an art and I respect that". I guess my husband took this as a challenge …. And so , our DIY Sushi Making adventure begins!

 I was super reluctant to try this at all. I had attempted sushi – a culinary Mt. Everest to me – in my more adventorous early 20's and had ended up with something resembling a sushi salad or cold sushi soup. Yup…. yuck. My husband felt more optimistic and he won in our small sushi battle. We ended up buying a bamboo rolling mat at bed bath and beyond in their asian cookware section – it was only $4.00. We bought the rest of our supplies at Wal Mart :

Sushi Ingredients:
Nori Seaweed Wrap Sheets (about $2.00) – comes with 20 sheets enough for many sushi nights!
Soy Sauce (about 2.00)
Wasabi (about 2.00)
Regular old long grain white rice… the kind that takes fifteen minutes to cook (about 2.00 for a bag – we skipped the whole buy special sushi rice and vinegar thing and it worked fine for us)
Cucumber
Avocado

Then – we educated ourselves on making sushi via the internet and especially youtube:
How To Roll Regular Sushi
helpful video on youtube on making straight up sushi. ignore all the veggies she adds and go simple!
How To Make an Inside Out California Roll
Get a little bit fancy and make your rice on the outside of your roll with this video!

Also – be sure to check out Sushi University. I love how easy it is to understand

Then we got around to the nitty gritty of rolling those darn sushi rolls. The first roll was a disaster. So was the second. Maybe the seventh one came out okay. The eighth – not so much. But eventually we found our groove and that night we feasted upon sushi on the cheap. It was awesome – and it was fun to learn something new! I could easily see us busting this out for parties or pot lucks. Yay, us.

Some Sushi Wisdom I Learned:

The first roll may not succeed. The third roll may not be a charm. But by the tenth roll, or 20th, you eventually have something that looks and tastes just like store-bought sushi! Don't give up.

Regular white rice works just fine and is a whole lot less complicated than fancy sushi rice.

The internet rocks for learning how to do complicated stuff . Thanks Youtube.