Sushi!

So we'll start with last nights adventure in cooking! One of our favorite foods is sushi!!! We don't eat it very often, because its expensive...but now we can make our own and experiment with all kinds of combinations!

First we needed to find a place that sold good fish, because we're in the middle of the desert there isn't too many, but we found and asian market in chandler on dobson amd warner called Lee Lee's (really its an international food market cause they carry foods from everywhere!) There wasn't too many people there that spoke english though...but luckily we found one of the guys in the fish market that did!

So when we got home we started the rice so it would be cool when we were ready to put it in our sushi. (we made a double batch to make sure we had enough, but as we were making it we figured out there really isn't a lot of rice in sushi...but we had a lot of everything so we ended up making a lot of sushi anyway!)
We also decided that we would take a stab at our favorite combinations...eel, cream cheese, shrimp tempura, cucumber, chives, salmon, and crab. So we started our prep work. Cutting veggies, fish, mixing the tempura batter, and frying our goodies!

Next we rolled them up! Laying out the rice, then the seaweed paper, a little more rice, cucumber, chives, tempura crab, tempura shrimp, salmon and a sprinkle of dill. And then roll it up tight! Slice then eat! A little soy sauce and some wasabi made it perfect!!!

And then our favorite, a tempura roll! No rice on the outside, and a little wasabi on the inside, next we dipped it in the tempura batter and into the frying pan! We found or favorite eel sauce that goes perfectly over a tempura roll! It was the icing on the cake...or roll I guess!

We also tried some sake, raspberry pear (I picked a girly flavor course!) Rob liked his warm, the traditional way to drink it...amd I liked mine cold, like a glass of white wine. I thought it was a little strong, but it was good (cold)!

All in all it was a very successful night! We definitely out did ourselves!

Our little oops' to remember for next time, eel is very hard to prepare...not something that we could do...its supposed to be grilled, smoked, then grilled again...next time, buy it pre cooked...if we can find it! We weren't able to use what we bought :(

We also made a lot! Its definitely a dinner to share with friends!