Homemade Sushi

I really want to take cooking classes. While I’ve been able to learn a lot from other bloggers, my Bubby, my parents and from reading lots of food magazines, there is still so much that I don’t know. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is make my own sushi. Publix offers classes, but I couldn’t find any that agreed with my schedule. Lucky for me, I have lots of friends who also love to cook and are always up for doing fun things in the kitchen. Case in point: my friend Shannon called me the other night and invited me over to make sushi with her and her friend, Danny. Apparently Danny is quite the self-made sushi-making expert; he had all the supplies we needed and took the rein as our teacher. 
It was such a cool experience... While the sushi rice cooked in the rice cooker, we prepared the veggies and made some edamame. Cucumbers, green onion and shredded carrot. We also had cream cheese, smoked salmon and sweet potato. Oh, and you can’t forget the eel sauce. We all LOVE eel sauce. After the rice was done cooking, Danny instructed me to fan the rice while he folded it in with the sushi rice wine in the bamboo bowl. This cools it down and gets it all nice and sticky and ready for rolling! Shannon and I watched carefully as Danny showed us how to spread the rice out onto the nori, add in the fillings and position the sushi in the bamboo just right to get as perfect a roll as we can. He made his with cream cheese, smoked salmon and cucumber. Shannon made cucumber, green onion and carrot; and I made mine with cream cheese, cucumber and carrots — the triple C roll! I ended up making another one with the sweet potato, too. We all drizzled eel sauce on top of our rolls. All 4 looked great and tasted even better because we made them ourselves!I’m so glad I got to learn a new cooking skill and was able to share the experience with one of my best friends, and also make a new friend at the same time! It’s awesome having Shannon down the street from me. She recently moved into a new apartment and now that she lives nearby, we’ve become a lot closer. Going on beach runs, cooking, Kabbalah, and whenever I bake she’ll stop by to be my taste-tester. Then of course it’s always nice to have someone right there for those random times you just need a good girl friend.I was pretty impressed with how quickly we caught on to making the rolls. Shannon has done it before, but it was a first for me. There are so many steps to the process that it seems like it would be difficult, but it actually wasn’t too bad! It does take time, so you need to be patient, but the result is so worth it. Now I can check off another thing on my food blogging bucket list!