Yep, I can now make SUSHI!

This past Saturday turned out to be a really exciting day for me, what I call a “SQUEE” day, because in my joy, I tend to make squee-like sounds. I stopped by Hobby Lobby to get the last of the required materials for my planned Halloween decorations, and ended up finding a substitute that saved me money. My last stop that day was Hancock Fabrics to buy a couple of yards of material for my new crafting venture, quilting (this should be fun!). But the stop in between made me the happiest by far!

Vinh Phat Grogery. What a place! A friend of mine actually told me about it one day while we were having dinner at a Filipino restaurant (which unfortunately didn’t last too long and is no longer there). Needless to say, I owe this woman more than she can imagine! Walking into the store for the first time was quite overwhelming, to say the least. The aisles aren’t too narrow, but in many, not only are the shelves PACKED with things, right on top of each other, but there are also boxes on the floor holding even MORE merchandise! Add in the fact that the predominant language on the labels is mostly Asian, and a person who can’t even claim to have a second language (even though I took French for a total of 4 years in high school and college) can get lost pretty quickly. But after browsing, you can learn fairly quickly where things generally are, which makes shopping a bit easier. You also have to take time to actually look and read labels, but those moments can produces some true gems!

One such example was the previous visit to Vinh Phat, when I was looking at the stuff in the freezer and found masago, or flying fish roe, something that I LOVE to have on my sushi! But sometimes my brain doesn’t function, so I simply thought oh, how cool, and walked off. K About a month or so ago, a friend of mine and I went out to look for Halloween decorations, and we stopped by Target so that I could look for a now impossible to find popcorn (if anyone ever sees a box of Orville Redenbacher POUR OVER Cheddar, PLEASE call me immediately! But it HAS to be POUR OVER!). It was lunch time, and Target’s sushi has always been fairly decent, so I picked some up for lunch. Somehow this started my sushi addiction all over again, but all I really want now are rolls, not my usual sashimi. One of my favorites is Inari (or “brown bag”) sushi, which isn’t fish at all, but is actually a sweet fried soy bag or pocket, stuffed with rice. So I buy the pack of sushi that contains the Inari and some snow crab rolls. One of my brain synapses fired, and this lead me to a classic I wonder if I can make that moment. So I hit the internet, but no luck on finding a recipe of HOW to make the bags, only how to prepare them. My brain STILL isn’t quite functional at this point, but I DO remember that a friend sent me a link to an Asian grocery site, so I start pricing things, including a sushi mat to make actual rolls. THEN it hit me! Vinh Phat! Besides food, they also have dishes, pots, pans, decorations, utensils for eating and cooking, little Buddha statues, incense. You name it, they probably have it! So I cross my fingers and plan a trip.

Which brings me to Saturday. I look up and down through their kitchen ware, I find bamboo chopsticks that are about 200 pairs for $1.50, I KID YOU NOT (well, I can’t estimate numbers very well, so it may have only been 100, but it was a LOT), I find the most adorable blue fish-shaped plate that WILL be mine one day, sushi sets, tea sets, EVERYTHING, but no sushi mats after 30 minutes of extensive searching. So I resign myself to simply buy whichever ingredients I can, and I would just buy the mat and Inari bags online. Then I find Inari bags, already prepared (minus the rice) in a can! Okay, that’s nice. So then I am picking out my nori (the seaweed sheets), and I look over to find…the sushi mats at the end of the aisle! SQUEE! NOW I am in business. So I buy my pickled ginger, I HAPPEN to find the red picked radish that I like (usually it is yellow), so that’s another squee moment, then finally I go to grab a container of masago. But as I take a closer look to see if I can find anything new and interesting, I see…SESAME BALLS! SUPER SQUEE! These are the reason why I go to Great Wall! They are sweet bean paste inside a dough made of rice flour, rolled in sesame seeds, then fried up, and they are SO YUMMY! So naturally, I buy a bag. With plans on stopping by Fresh Pickins for avocado and cucumber, and Walmart for artificial crab, I am all set to recreate my delicious sushi box, with the added bonus of desert!

I have tried to make sushi rolls before, but apparently I didn’t have the correct recipe for the rice, and I also didn't have the right equipment (the mat) or seaweed. So I cooked the last of my calrose rice, followed the directions from various sites, and just went to town!



The makings of a snowcrab roll and Inari sushi



I had a large bag of sesame seeds at home, but you always see the black ones mixed in for sushi, so I bought some black sesame, and made my own mix. I had wasabi powder (that’s its original form according to a friend of mine) at home and mixed my own, but I am going to stick to the prepared paste now that I found it; mine still had that dehydrated taste, even after sitting for a while. With all my ingredients and equipment on hand, I rolled (and stuffed)!



Yes, I know my plate is small and over stuffed. I need a proper plate. That fish-shaped one would be nice! ;)



The final result was actually BETTER than I imagined! The taste was AMAZING! My rolling technique could be a little tighter, but I will get better with time. The best part is that I can make up a fresh roll at almost any time! I don’t like sushi that’s been sitting in the refrigerator overnight because the rice becomes hard, and it drastically reduces the palatability of sushi for me (somehow the grocery store cooler doesn’t do this to the rice). But if you reheat the rice in the microwave and THEN make a roll, it is just as good as when it was made with rice freshly cooked.

I haven’t been able to make other types yet because I ran out of rice, and I don’t know where I can find sushi-grade fish, but I DO know where I can find smoked salmon, so next paycheck will see some Philadelphia rolls! I still have a few shrimp in my freezer, so I may try my hand at Crunchy roll some day soon as well. If I can ever get a blender and NOT break it the first time I use it, I will try to make a ginger dressing sauce like they have at Koto’s, and then I will try to recreate their Bomb roll, which is really good, but is fully cooked since they tempura fry it (in other words, I don't have to worry about sushi-grade raw fish). I can’t wait! So if you don’t mind the not-so-fishy and artificial crab rolls, let me know, come on over, and we can ROLL with it however you want! Maybe I can even convince you to watch Memoirs of a Geisha with me for the umpteenth gazillion time! I certainly have enough green tea!

Quiche and Comfort Food

When most people think of comfort food, they think of home cooked meals from mom, dad, or grandma. Not me! I am certain that there were other things my mother cooked (like crawfish etouffee for xmas eve, boiled crawfish or roasted pig for easter, and the occasional gumbo during the winter season), but ask me if I can think of more than a handful of dishes other than rice and gravy (what people from other regions would call smothered, as the version I know is a flourless, onion-based “gravy”) that anyone in my family has ever cooked, and I would have to answer with an emphatic “no.” I feel like I’ve eaten the same meal every night of my first 18 years of life up until the time I went to college. Strangely enough, guess what we eat during family holidays and gatherings! Yeah, see above. Needless to say, I am still bored with all those types of food and will rarely cook them for myself, because I get tired of them with the first bite!

Every once in a while, my parents would take me out to eat, and I can tell you that I’ve never experienced such joys! Back then, Chinese was just so different and unique! Now I can cook it with relative ease, and some things I can reproduce as good as or better than from a take-out restaurant! Part of my process of becoming who I am as an individual had a lot to do with eating out, learning I CAN cook, and learning how to experiment with ingredients you would be very hard pressed to find anywhere in the small town in which I was raised.

Now I’m not saying I didn’t learn any cooking skills as a child. Funny story, there was one time when my sister was watching me (she’s 11 years older than I), and she was cooking dinner. She told me to help her by pealing the potatoes. I actually started crying when she fussed at me because I said I didn’t know how to use a vegetable peeler, and she didn’t believe me. The fact was I really didn’t. I learned quickly, and wouldn’t you know I took that very same vegetable peeler with me when I left home? I have tried so many other types, fancy and plain, and not a single other peeler works nearly as well as that one!

So comfort food. For me it is hard to describe, because it isn’t anything that brings back nostalgia, it isn’t anything starchy like potatoes or pasta (both of which have to be swimming in dairy product of some sort before either are even remotely palatable- would you like a little pasta with your ricotta, ma’am?), it isn’t a specific type of meat, and it isn’t anything that has been familiar to me for very long. For some reason, though, eggs can often leave me with at least some feeling of contentment. Oh, not “regular eggs” like boiled or scrambled, but when it is part of something else, they can sing. And besides, egg is used as a type of “mortar” for so many things, like crème brulee, and cheesecake! Another type of food that I like to make is pies. I LOVE pies, or I should say that I love making pies. I usually eat one slice and leave the rest for others. So why not put them together? What a wonderful idea! J

I never really tried quiche before because I was under the illusion that it was nothing more than scrambled eggs with stuff in it, much like an omelet. I’d go to La Madeline’s, and always got something else; I mean how can anyone pass up Chicken Friand?! Bliss in a pastry! But one day, I just decided to make one, and it was AMAZING! I usually try to make one-serving meals, because I really dislike left-overs (microwave-heated food usually tastes really gross to me), but I got over that inhibition easily with this pastry wonder!

But first, the CRUST! There is only ONE recipe that I will ever use, and it is this one: 2 cups flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, ½ teaspoon salt, 2/3 cup lard or shortening, ½ cup iced water; combine dry ingredients, cut in fat until mixture resembles coarse cornmeal with a  few pea-sized pieces, add water and toss to coat, form into a ball and knead a few times until a dough is formed, divide in half and wrap each piece in plastic wrap or wax paper, allow to rest in refrigerator 30 minutes before rolling out.

I happened to find it on a website called Baking911 (a friend directed me there for cake-related recipes) before they changed it to members only and required people to log-in (not sure if it is free, because I never had reason to sign up). It was a recipe called Ultimate Apple Pie, and it included this pie crust recipe. Since I can’t link directly to their site, consider this my disclaimer that this is NOT my original recipe, it belongs to someone else. I would go back to it so often that I finally just copied it into a word document for ease of access. Lucky for me that I was being lazy and will always have it as a result! I will ALWAYS use lard in my pie crust, unless I KNOW that a vegetarian will be eating it, since I don’t know how strict their anti-animal policy is, in which case I will use regular vegetable shortening. The sugar can be left out, but even if I am making a meat pie, I always include it. This has become so easy and fool-proof for me to make that I will rarely use premade crusts any more.

For the quiche filling, this is the recipe that I improved upon, I mean improvised ;P : http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Belle-and-Chrons-Spinach-and-Mushroom-Quiche/Detail.aspx

Here is where mine differs: 1. I layer the bacon directly on the bottom of the pie crust; 2. I saut  the mushrooms (I use portabella caps sliced thin and cut to approx. 1-inch pieces) and onions (and add in a clove of freshly minced garlic because I am incapable of cooking non-dessert foods without it), then layer that on top of the bacon; 3. I layer most of my cheese (I used sliced swiss, sliced provelone, and a little shredded cheddar this time) on top of the previous layer; 4. Tonight, I used frozen spinach, which I heated until thawed, then squeezed to remove moisture, then layered as best I could over the cheese – otherwise I would just layer the fresh spinach, as I have in the past; 5. I beat the eggs with an electric mixer until foamy and the color has lightened a little (the more the eggs have been beaten, the fluffier the finished product will be), then I mix in the milk or cream and seasonings (I never measure my pepper; I just add it until I feel there are enough specks to make me happy). Here is the final result:

I really would like to try this with pancetta instead of bacon, and use fresh mozzarella , ricotta, and parmigiano-reggiano, but I was trying to figure out some way to use up the cheeses in my fridge, and came up with this idea since it was such a success previously (although then I had used only cheddar).

Et voilà! Eggs + cheese + pie crust= comfort food! C’est magnifique!