On Dates, Deliciousness, And Dares

Hey there all you wonderful, joyous people of love and joy - today I have two things to talk to you about! Yes, two! Are you not mallards made of the most spectacular luck? A brief introduction to today's blog is, admittedly, thing number one, but (as usual) it is quite removed from thing two, and so I have decided to count it differently. Today you may notice me rambling slightly more than usual. I am, you see, quite tired - I have not had what I would consider a "proper" night's sleep in a while now (usually interrupted by nightmares, or just general movement on my own behalf) and whilst I know that this is no-where near as bad as some people (indeed, some of my friends are visited by the insomnia fairy quite frequently) it is still frustrating enough that trying to work is an irritation, especially when my mind constantly flicks between English and other languages.

Besides being a horrible day to be awake, today is also a day to celebrate (which kind of annoys me, because...well...it shouldn't be such a frabjous day if I can't fully appreciate both the fabulousness and the joyousness of the occasion.) You see, in some circles - the ones that use the date standard that we here in Australia do not - today is Pi Approximation day (the 3rd Month and 14th Day of the year.) Of course, the best Pi Approximation that I'm likely to see doesn't come until 2015 rocks around (Month 3, Day 14, Year '15, Hour 9, Minute 26, Second 53, Millisecond 58, and so on ad infinitum...) And then we have the Australian (and British, and other peoples' who use the correct date format) Pi Approximation day of the 22nd of July (because 22/7 is a relatively okay approximation of pi in fractional format.)

But Pi is not the reason I wanted to talk to you today! No, no, and no indeed again. Today's blog post is all about the wondrous thing that I (and some of my friends) spent the vast majority of Saturday doing. Yes, that's right, from roughly 2pm on Saturday, until roughly 10pm Squiggles, Emma, Elmo, Kylie, and I cooked and cooked and cooked away, until we had enough sushi to feed not only ourselves, but also enough to take up to Spud and Encey (who were at The LAN, and thus could not make sushi) with enough left over for...well...significant leftovers!

Our Finished Sushi Product

About Half The Leftovers

I know that a lot of you are wondering just how sushi is made and, whilst no videos were taken of the actual sushi making itself (oh no, today's One Minute is much more entertaining than that) I can give you some pointers, and the recipes that I used for all of the ingredients. Below is a picture of the raw ingredients that we started with - there was squid, salmon, chicken, eggplant, carrot, tofu, cucumber, egg, tuna, avocado, rice, various sauces like sweet Japanese mayonnaise and mirin, and a couple of dry things like salt, too. I think that's everything. Anyway, after about 4 or 5 solid hours of preparing the rice, letting various things marinate, and then cooking them, we ended up with: lemon, garlic, and herb squid; honey, soy, and ginger chicken; teriyaki chicken; apple-vinegar tofu; miso tofu; tamagoyaki; tempura eggplant; salted salmon; julienne vegetables; and...well...cooked rice. You can see these things in the second image below.

Mostly Raw Ingredients (Plus Some Chicken Marinating In Some Bowls)

Finished Fillings

Nothing that I prepared was overly difficult, and if you only make one or two fillings then you'll have a pretty easy time. The hardest thing to make is, funnily enough, the tamagoyaki (egg-roll thingo), which requires a lot of practice to get right. Otherwise, for the chicken, you cook it like you normally would (after letting it marinate in the fridge for a while.) For the squid, you need to make sure that it doesn't get too rubber (and don't eat the purple bit at the bottom of it, either.) The salmon just needs to be salted likely (use rock salt, and rub it into the flesh of the salmon, softly) and left to sit for as long as possible, before you seal it on all sides (as briefly as is humanly possible, or to taste - I didn't trust the fish in Bathurst so I cooked it on a low heat, on all sides, so it was even all the way through.) Tofu is easy to cook as well - it takes on the flavour of whatever you cook it in!

This Is Unsalted Eggplant, Just After I Cut It Up

This Is What Happens When You Leave Salted Eggplant To Sit For About 3 Hours

The rice is possibly challenging if you don't have a good rice cooker, because (unlike normal rice) it requires patience and...well...a couple of special things. Firstly, you need to wash the rice effectively (duh - but just keep washing until the water runs clear.) Following this, put the rice in your pot with enough water to come up one knuckle further than the rice, and add some salt and a little bit of rice-wine vinegar (but only the tiniest amount, and this stage) to the water. You then heat the water/rice combo to a boil, before quickly reducing it to a low (quite low, I believe) simmer, and put the lid on. After this you wait for roughly 20 minutes, though it can take up to half-an-hour - you must not remove the lid during this time! When the rice is done, you have to stir in a special seasoning sauce thing that you can make yourself from rice-wine vinegar, sugar, and salt - or you can buy sushi seasoning stuff in a bottle from woolies, and it works just as well if you're in a hurry (but it's better to make it yourself, really.) Then you cool it with a hand fan until the rice is all nice and room temperature - do not cool it in the fridge, use a hand fan (or, if you have to, an electric fan.) Congratulations, you have now made sushi rice!

After you have your rice and fillings prepared, you're ready to roll (please forgive the pun there.) This bit is the fun part, and it's relatively easy. You'll need some yaki nori (the seaweed), a bowl of lukewarm water (that you can wet your hands with) and a surface to prepare on. Basically you just put the seaweed on your surface, shiny side down, and wet your hands, before putting on a thin layer of rice about 2.5 to 3.5 inches long, that starts about 1 inch from the bottom of your seaweed (if you don't wet your hands, the rice will stick to you like nobody's business.) Layer some toppings on the rice, in nice straight lines, and then roll. It's kind of difficult to explain the rolling process on here. I suggest you check out YouTube, and I don't have any videos of me doing it myself. After you are finished rolling, you just cut it into bit-sized portions, and put it aside until you're finished.

Cutting, Cutting, Cutting, Cutting

More Cutting! From Different Angles!!

Following what was, for us, a fairly mammoth effort in creating various different kinds of sushi rolls, we tucked into our meals and ate until we felt...well...kinda ill - but that's to be expected when your eyes are so much larger than your stomach. Following this, we took some video of us being idiots with the leftover wasabi (I also got some shots of some people at The LAN trying it out as well, and Encey demonstrated herself to be quite hardcore - I just hope the quality is good enough to be put in the video...Oh, and my youngest brother Yuck is in there as well, because he'll do anything if you promise him M&Ms afterwards.) Basically with wasabi the reaction is kind of a delay, and it works its way into your sinuses and all over your palette - it is harsher when it's mixed with the sticky rice, and you have to chew. I hope you enjoy the rest of the photos, as well as One Minute Of Wasabi Reactions.

Scott Got Caught Eating Some Chips - Bad Scott

He Tried To Be Charming To Compensate

Emma Also Wore A Fancy Hat...MY FANCY HAT!!

Kylie Just Looks Forlorn Cos She Has No Fancy Hats

Michael Wanted To Eat For About 8 Hours Before He Was Allowed To

We Ended Up With The Mountains Of Sushi!

A Minute Of Wasabi Reaction Shots

The moral of this story is that I really can't wait until I get to travel to Sydney to buy myself a tiered bento box - a proper one that I can take my food to work in. Of course, if someone from Sydney who reads this was nice enough to buy me one and post it to me, I wouldn't complain, and I'd even give them money for it if they were really nice. I might even feature them in a post...Well heck - they bought me the thing I currently want really badly, I would liken them to some kind of gift giving deity. Which would be nice, for them, I think.