Daring Cooks - Sushi English style.

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge. As Audax does even when he isn't hosting he has done a whole host of varieties and as he is in Australia he was also first to post this month so if you want to see a wider range and indeed a blog version of all the very thorough instructions they gave us check out his blog.

Our Challenge was to make three specific forms of sushi and in that I failed as I never made the dragon sushi but I did make several types of the other two.

I've struggled to find Nori as it's a bit random who will have it in around here and didn't end up with any wasabi but I knew I'd have to leave that out for most of the family though I like it so that was not a major loss.

My rice did burn a little on the bottom (I never get rice cooked this way right) but the rest of it was fine. It has a very nice taste once the dressing is added I must say and we all enjoyed it though it was quite a faff to make compared to standard rice.. but then you can't make pretty shapes with standard rice!

I started with a British fusion idea I had so here is an English Breakfast roll served with tomato sauce as that is what you get with breakfast, though brown sauce would be fine as well and closer to soy in flavour.. I just liked the colour better of the tomato! for the photo! I think actually they would work with soy sauce too.

Filling is egg, bacon, mushroom, tomato and black pudding (blood sausage). I only did one sheet of nori so it isn't really a spiral but they were still great.
Then I did tuna and sweetcorn at the request of my 6 year old. Again one sheet and pretty much all eaten by him, he came back for seconds and thirds!

Next came Nigiri sushi which I did find harder as the rice didn't like sticking together firmly enough, though it liked sticking to me if I didn't keep my hands quite wet! As Audax had done vegimite and cheese I felt I had to do Marmite and cheese, I also did some with a cheese that has branston pickle added to it. The small one loved them but the older ones of us decided that grating the cheese and doing it in a roll would work better. The Marmite does as a lovely savoury taste though again it is quite like soy sauce in that regard. I also did ones with smoked salmon. No raw fish for us not because we don't like it but we live as far from the sea as you can get in this country and so I didn't feel any of the fish on offer was fresh enough.

Finally I did some plain rolls wrapped in Nori with toppings. Do they have another name? We had prawns and cucumber and black and white pudding. The puddings are the same recipe but the black one had blood and the white doesn't. They are a sort of oat based spiced sausage and actually made really delicious sushi, Black pudding sushi will defiantly be on our list in the future.

I have promised  Noodles I will make him some egg wrapped sushi as he wasn't totally struck on the seaweed.. this he tells me after eating about 6 pieces ! I also really want to have a go at the more complicated rolls with faces and flowers and so on. I figure I can make canes in Polymer clay and it's basically the same technique give or take :)  So watch this space for my alien faces when they all go wrong!!