Tuesday, February 15, 2005

A Romantic Valentine's: Creative Sushi Dinner

♥ tabeshimashita @ pinkcocoa's cosy home on 14th Feb 2005
Valentine's Sweetheart Cookies
♥ Sweetheart Cookies 2 for A$2.50
Happy belated Valentine's! Hopefully it was all sweet, rosy, dreamy, romantic for everyone yesterday.

Valentine's Dinner - Roll Your Own Sushi
♥ Roll Your Own Sushi Dinner
We had a simple Japanese dinner at home for Valentine's. It was something very simple, requiring minimal effort. All I had to do was julienned up all the veggies, slice up other stuff. Not much cooking involved basically. What's left was just a matter of presentation.

On the left of the photo, we have Chinese Pork Floss. In the white bowl were mayo sweet corn and chili-mayo tuna. In the tiny blue bowl was chopped grilled eel with mayo.

Sushi Ingredients
♥ Sushi Ingredients
Clockwise from top-centre:
tamagoyaki (sweet egg omelette - recipes and instruction from obachan!)
cucumber
kanpyo (dried gourd strips in sweet soy sauce - bought from store)
carrots
snowpea sprouts
tamagoyaki again
cucumber again
unagi no kabayaki (grilled eel - store bought)
carrots again

Right in the centre were some alfafa topped with pickled ginger.

Other ingredients you could add to this include sashimi, prawns and even soft-shell crabs, just to make the dinner more extravagant. Teriyaki chicken, pork-katsu (deepfried crumbed pork), bamboo shoots, potato salad etc etc etc. Whatever you can think of!

Put Ingredients on Nori Sheet
♥ Laying out Ingredients
What you do is take a sheet of nori (seaweed), put some sushi rice on top then pick ingredients you like and lay them on top of the rice. Then using your hand, roll up everything. Don't worry if the ingredients aren't in the centre. This is really like a hand-roll.

Roll Your Own Sushi Done!
♥ Instant Sushi!
So here goes instant sushi made by yourself! You can be really creative with the combination of ingredients! We had quite a bit of fun creating sushi for each other. ;-)