Bento Box Blog: Sushi rolls attempt

I have been looking at Youtube videos - How to make California Rolls and Tiger Rolls and other related videos. I thought, hey, why not give it a shot? I don't have any Nori (Sheets of dried/toasted seaweed) I don't have any cucumber or avacado, I don't even have any spring onion. I don't have any Red Caviar or wasabi or japanese pickled ginger... I don't even have any proper sushi rice... I certainly don't have any raw fish in the house - The shops are all shut cos it's Sunday, What was I thinking?!?!?

I don't even have a bamboo mat for doing the rolling!!!

But I'm impatient and willing to look for a workaround... So I boiled up some of the basmati rice, and got a H&M carrier bag and covered it in cling film. I opened a can of tuna and my toddler helped mix mayonnaise into it. I DID buy a jar of red pepper puree last week - I think the photo is on my Flickr account, so i thought I would try spreading that on, to get a nice bright dash of red. I used a Leek instead of cucumber or spring onion and I chopped a carrot lengthways. These along with the tuna mayo were my filling, and the red pepper paste was spread on the leek. Then I rolled it up using my "H&M" carrier bag sushi folding mat LOL and compressed it further with my hands along the roll. Then I sprinkled sesame seeds all over it. Cutting it was the tough part. The worst part. the part that made it break into a thousand pieces. The rice was still hot though so I thought that was probably a mistake and also I didn't compress the rice into a ball before spreading it on the H&M board.

BUT WHEN I TASTED the ruins of my masterpiece i thought WOW this has got to be the best thing I have ever tasted!!!

So I decided to have another go, this time, the rice was cooler and i compressed it first before spreading on the sushi board. It went a lot better this time and although it still broke up in a few places when I tried to cut it, I did mange to get 4 out of the 7 pieces to be salvage worthy! The end bit was kind of cool too- A bit like the Tiger Roll with all bits sticking out of the end, looked quite fancy so i left it as a long bit for the sushi plate, which I finished off with a couple of baby sweetcorns and a blob of the red pepper which was a very very interesting flavour - almost a replacement for the pickled ginger!

Then the "ruins" got turned into balls and coated in sesame seeds. Waste not want not, right?! And then I got an idea because I saw the balls were small, medium and large. And then I thought I could make a snowman. I dunno I must be high today. But anyway I stuck some food picks in to try to get them to stack up on top of each other but they were starting to break up and kept falling down, so I had to leave him on his side. He got apple cores for arm, and my toddler helped to cut a triangle nose out of the carrot. and then we put 2 little cake deco balls on for eyes.

So there you have it, classy posh japanese art form inspires a fun activity morning for mum and toddler with tasty results! Not bad considering we just used ingredients we had on hand!