Sushi!

Usually when I bother to make sushi it's a big production - I'm having people over, or going to a potluck or something, and I make 4 cups of rice and end up doing something like 20 rolls. It almost always involves a shopping trip, because if I'm going to all that trouble, gosh darn it, it will have exactly everything I want in it. I'm usually not motivated to just make a couple rolls for myself, but I'd been craving it for a long time so it finally happened.

Unfortunately it happened on a Saturday, when I was almost out of vegetables (my favorite farmers market here is on Sunday - weird, right?). But I had an avocado, and that's really the only thing I insist on having before I'll make sushi. Usually I'll want some tofu and carrots, but didn't have either and it was just fine. Actually it was super.



I also didn't have sushi rice, but I did have arborio. I've used sushi rice to make risotto before and it worked great, so I figured the reverse was probably true, and it definitely is. I recommend it to everyone who has limited cupboard space and can't just go keeping all kinds of different short grain rice varieties laying around all the time.

I won't go into a whole tutorial on sushi rolling, I'll just say (1) wet your fingers before you spread out the rice, because it's sticky, (2) spread it all the way to the sides of the nori but not all the way to the top or bottom, (3) put the filling in a line, don't cover all of the rice, and (4) look up a real tutorial if you haven't rolled sushi before, so you don't squeeze all your vegetables out or otherwise end up with a big mess.



I didn't have many vegetables but I did have kale, and I sauteed it with a lot of garlic and ginger, then seasoned it with sesame oil, rice vinegar, and soy sauce. One roll was just avocado and vegenaise (trust me, it's good); the other two were avocado and kale and yes, more vegenaise. I have it on good authority that in Japan apparently they put mayonnaise in almost all the sushi, so I didn't make it up. I just made it better.

The rice: I love the recipe I use; 4 C water, 3.5 C rice, cook 15 min, then leave on the stove with the heat off 15 more. Mix then add 5 T rice vinegar, 5 T sugar, 4 t salt.

Oh, and I add a little rice vinegar, garlic, sesame oil, and ginger to my soy sauce. It's worth the trouble.



Sushi is worth the trouble in general. Next time maybe I'll bother to make some with rice on the outside. We'll see.

Ratatouille

Not really! Because, well, it's not so much that I hate eggplant, I just don't see myself ever buying it. But I did buy a ton of tomato seconds at the farmers market (cheap, but don't last long) and needed to use them up. I also had a bunch of squash.

I sauteed a red onion and half a white onion (diced), with two zucchini and two summer squash (medium sized, sliced into half moons), then added salt, pepper, a few cloves of chopped garlic, veggie broth, and lots of chopped and seeded tomatoes. Cook this til the tomatoes break down and the sauce thickens, taste for seasoning, and add fresh thyme.

I also didn't bake this, which I gather is one aspect of many "traditional" old worldy ratatouille recipes. Meh. It was good and kept me from wasting vegetables.

Here's some on quinoa. I added white beans after I took the picture because I had a ton and thought it would go well together. It did.



Tastes like summer.

Blueberry Cornmeal Muffins

No recipe with this post, because I used the Vegan with a Vengeance recipe and didn't make much in the way of changes. After a second round of blueberry picking, I wasn't motivated to bake a pie so I made these, ate a ton of berries, and froze a huge ziplock bag of them. I'll probably bake a pie with some of those later.

I'd like to try these with some whole grain flour, but don't know if they'd be too heavy considering they're already half cornmeal. Has anyone out there tried baking with a combination of cornmeal and whole wheat flour?

Brief gripe: I like all the muffin and cupcake recipes I've tried in Vegan with a Vengeance and that whole line of books, but the proportions for the recipes as a whole are almost always way off. This didn't really make 12 muffins. It made 12 really short muffins that aren't really muffin shaped. I should have made it into 8 or 10. This sort of nonsense is ok with cupcakes, cause you can frost them and make them look more normal, but really. Just scale up the recipes ladies.

Summer Salads

I continue to be a lousy blogger, because it continues to be ridiculously hot out and the food I've been eating is (a) boring and (b) redundant. I did go berry picking in Maryland a couple weeks ago - blueberries, raspberries, black raspberries, and sour cherries. Most went straight into the freezer though, because I was heading out of town. I'll hopefully go pick a lot more blueberries soon.

Here are a couple of slightly more interesting (not lettuce) summery salads I've made recently.

This was roasted beets (I picked them at the U-pick berry farm!) with olive oil, garlic, onion, salt, and pepper. I let them cool then added red wine vinegar and fresh thyme.



Also in that picture was a really easy salad of brown rice, split peas, and homemade barbecue sauce. Would have been better with black-eyed peas or maybe white beans, but I didn't have time to cook them. I like this cold or at room temperature.

It would have been good with fresh oregano and scallions and maybe some cooked kale or fresh spinach. I'd missed the farmers markets the weekend before and was out of almost everything, unfortunately. For a dinner of desperation this turned out pretty well.

Last, a really easy tomato, basil, and corn salad. Just core, seed and chop a few tomatoes, add the kernels from one or two cooked ears of corn, add olive oil, a clove of minced garlic, maybe one finely chopped scallion, 10-15 leaves thinly sliced basil, salt, pepper, and either balsamic or red wine vinegar. I added some cooked white beans and chopped avocado at the end.



Bonus picture for reading to the end - check out this massive morel I found this spring! My weirdly short fingers make it look even bigger.