Sushi Time

I was always under the impression that making sushi was difficult, that it required a lot of prep time and skill in assembly. I was happy to discover that it is, in fact, extraordinarily easy to make. The essentials include rolling mats, sushi rice and nori sheets. You should also find some pickled ginger and wasabi; we have a wasabi powder that mixes with water. The filling can be anything you want, from the ubiquitous avocado to the too often overlooked oshinko.

We used a recipe from Veganomicon for a spicy tempeh filling, but you certainly don’t need to be that fancy. We also had some beets, green onions, pan fried asparagus, avocado and pickled daikon (which is a Japanese root vegetable, the aforementioned oshinko). We ‘topped’ them off with some sesame seeds.

If you’re worried about rolling them up then poke around the interwebs, there are lots of sites that offer instructions, just don’t expect to be as fast and precise as this person (and ignore that they’re using crab meat).

We’ve also been making quite a bit of raw sushi lately. There’s a recipe in Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen for a walnut based spread to use instead of rice, we like it a lot! Though you would be well advised to ignore her instructions to add soy sauce to the walnut paste, it overwhelms the flavor, especially if you’re going to dip the sushi in soy sauce. You can replace it with water to avoid taste bud overload.

We added bean sprouts, carrots and zucchini… yum!! As you can see our rolling skillz need a little work still, but they are perfectly edible, even if they look a little sad.