Japanese Night...

I've been trying to challenge myself more in the kitchen lately by attempting to recreate certain foods that I love to go out and order at restaurants. One meal I absolutely adore is sushi! I had someone teach me how to make itonce in high school, but lets not talk about how long ago that was...so, basically, I had to learn all over again.
I found an asian market in the town next to mine and ended up spending 2 hours in there wandering around and asking questions. Before long, my sushi dinner turned into sushi with sticky rice, spring rolls, tempura shrimp, Korean barbecue ribs, wasabi rice crackers, dessert sushi with mocchi ice cream, and saki! When I got home with all of my ingredients, I was a little overwhelmed to say the least! The man that was helping me was nice enough to explain how to prepare everything, so I got down to it...

My Tuna Rolls with spicy sauce on the side. I kept it simple...

I used the bamboo mat that the sushi chef's use and they all stayed together for the most part! My helper friend at the store told me they usually use AA grade tuna for sushi, but I used AAA just to be on the safe side. I'll leave the AA to the experts...

Tempura shrimp weren't super difficult to make. I purchased the batter ahead of time and only had to add a few ingredients, then I fried them up...

I had a bowl of wasabi rice crackers out in case the boyfriend or myself got a little hungry while I was cooking. I bought the little plastic bowl at the asian store along with my new saki cups and pitcher. Do they call that thing a pitcher? I don't know...

Rice! I didn't know that they add a liquid that they call "sushi seasoning" to their rice to make it sticky and a little bit sour. I was walking around the store looking for an actual jar of seasoning for a while until I finally asked my new friend for some help! He was seriously the best...

These would be my shrimp spring rolls that I messed up! You buy the rice paper to wrap the ingredients with in a package of sheets, which you put in warm water one at a time to loosen them up. I chose not to read the back of the package and put them all in the water at once, causing them to all stick together! It was a mess! They ended up tasting pretty good, so here's the recipe I used. You will definitely have better luck than me by simply reading the directions!

The Korean Barbecue ribs were easy. I just marinated them in a plum barbecue sauce for an hour then put them in the oven at 300 degrees for 3 hours-They were pretty well roasted by then. The flavor was a little too sweet for me, so I think I'll stick to American ribs...

This was dessert, along with mocchi ice cream, which is like an ice cream dumpling. I made this dessert  sushi with rice crispy treats, a Swedish Fish on top, and part of a fruit by the foot to act as the seaweed. I wanted to find green fruit roll ups, but my grocery store didn't have them!

I served everything with chopsticks and we ate as much as we could...

But we still had plenty of leftovers! It was definitely an experience-I learned a lot of new things and drank a lot of saki! It's not something I'd do once a week, but I would definitely enjoy learning how to make different kinds of sushi!

C