Who wants some sushi?

Last weekend Megan and I went to a restaurant called Tampopo to learn to make some sushi. It was my Christmas present from Megan. We both like sushi and we’ve enjoyed cooking together, so it was a great opportunity to add a new menu item to the list. Tampopo is a small Japanese restaurant in downtown St. Paul by the farmers market. There were six of us in the class with the head chef. None of us had made sushi before, except for a large man named ABBA, who was having trouble cooking the rice and received the class as a gift to hone his skills.

Making sushi isn’t too difficult if you get a couple things right. The most important one is the rice. You need to cook it to the right consistency so that it turns into a nice fluffy ball of stickiness. My guess is that our first batch of sushi rice will do anything but stick together. Luckily, she cooked up the rice for us so we could make sure to go home with some good sushi. Once the rice was cooked and ready, we just had to add our other ingredients; seaweed, crab (cooked), raw tuna, eel (cooked), shrimp (cooked) and smoked salmon. We used these ingredients in different combinations to make the sushi you see in the picture. The most popular and our favorite were the inside-out rolls. They’re the rolls with the rice on the outside. Inside-out rolls are actually not a traditional sushi; they were invented in the United States. I think you end up with a little more rice and a little less seaweed that way. Megan did a better job of rolling her sushi (her tray is on top); I had a lot of rice in mine. Overall, we had made:

California inside out rolls (crab meat) - Megan’s favorite
Spicy raw tuna inside out rolls – My favorite
BBQ eel traditional rolls with the seaweed on the outside
Hand-shaped shrimp, tuna, and yellow fin
Smoked Salmon balls with lemon

Wow was it good! Fresh sushi tastes completely different than even sushi that’s just a few hours old. The big pieces of raw tuna and yellow fin were a little too mushy for Megan, so as you can see, I got a good helping of them. I think I traded her some California rolls.

So when we have a house warming party, get ready to have some sushi! Which reminds me, I should also say that we bought the house! We’re very excited. Our closing date is April 24. We wanted to push it back so we could have time to find someone to replace Megan in her current lease. If you know someone that would like to live downtown in a pretty cool condo, let us know! They’ll have a pretty fun roommate in Betsy as well.