This week in the crisper, mushrooms are already renowned for being healthful and delicious, but they can also be a lot of fun. All the more so when you soak them in brandy and light them on fire. This type of fun guy is incredibly versatile, too. Recipe here.
This week in the crisper, a savory and not-too-sweet dessert that reads like a biography of me. And maybe you, too. Recipe here.
Having just moved from the urburbs to a full-on suburban town with a dearth of takeout sushi, we got our priorities in order. Step one, homemade sushi. Step two, umami bliss. Step three, unpack.
It’s hard to be taken seriously as an umami girl without a killer homemade sushi recipe. Still, I sure have taken my time sharing this one. Homemade sushi had been on my to-do list for years before I screwed up the roe to give it a try. (Wait, what does she think roe is?) I could never really identify what I was afraid of, but I never really had to, since totally decent takeout was always so readily available.
Not so much anymore. I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were preparing to move. It’s about the longest and least-linear story the world has ever known, so I won’t bother you with the details. But the endpoint, at least, is clear. The sign on the porch reads: “Cute house, needs work. No sushi.”
We’d known the move was coming for a while, so in addition to tinkering with kitchen layouts on Google Sketchup and hard-selling the new town to the kids, I gave myself several months of advance planning on the homemade sushi front. I’m no Morimoto to say the least, but we discovered that compared to the run-of-the-mill takeout we’d been living off on a weekly basis in our urburban city, the homemade stuff is a lot more special. (And I don’t mean “special,” like the temporary kitchen with no floor in the cute house.)
It’s hardly worth pointing out that sushi is a full-fledged umami experience. In this recipe, the umami flavors owe to the nori, the soy sauce, and to some extent the salmon and the shallot. Just as important as the umami itself is the range of other flavors and textures that it acts on. The creaminess of the avocado, the salmon and the mayonnaise, the spice from the Sriracha, the pungency of the shallots, the crunch of shallot and cucumber, and the saltiness of many of the ingredients all work together in an alchemy of taste. This dish, like all umami-rich food, is more than the sum of its parts. It eats like magic, but those parts were built from the ground up, with lots of attention to detail. Just like the special kitchen, and the whole special house, will be one day soon.
Until then, sushi.
{CLICK HERE for the Homemade Sushi Recipe…}
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