There aren't many sushi restaurants in Montana, so most of the time I have to deal with store bought rolls that are lacking in quality and aren't exactly fresh. That all changed at Gift Giving Orgy Day (the day formerly known as Christmas) when Megan got me all of the ingredients I would need to make my own along with rolling mats, recipe books, and an instructional video. Fuck she gives the best gifts. This one probably tops the basket filled with carefully chosen mustard varieties to complement my pre-existing collection.

Anyway, we made two different kinds of sushi tonight to celebrate the weekend, so here's some pictures of how it all went down.

The first type is a normal nori roll featuring traditional ingredients. I just recently found a place in town that offers sushi grade tuna so I thought I'd give it a try. To complement the fish I cooked up some asparagus, which was cooked in a mixture of water and freshly squeezed lemon juice with salt and pepper.


Next up I started preparing the second kind of filling, which is much less traditional but still amazingly good. First I diced up a bunch of celery and green onions.



Then I diced and mixed in pickled ginger along with mashed up surimi (fake crab made with several different fish). Some mayonnaise (sorry, American instead of Japanese as nowhere sells it around here), wasabi and Asian chili sauce rounded it out.



Back to the first kind of roll. It was firm to the touch, the right color, and wasn't frozen, but unfortunately it had a bit of that unpleasantly pungent fish odor. This is the number 1 indicator that it isn't sushi grade and is not safe to eat raw. I made a quick nigri-zushi roll to taste it and make the final decision.



The tuna tasted good raw, but I would be serving these rolls to other people so I decided to err on the side of caution and pan sear it for about a minute on each side. This did give me the benefit of being able to play around with the flavor. I cooked it in lemon, soy sauce, and a dash of salt and pepper.



Here's a picture of the main ingredients for the first kind of roll in their finalized forms.



And then here's the finished stuffing for the reverse nori spicy sarimi roll.



We layed the nori rolls on our sushi mats and covered them with the sushi rice I had made the day before. For anyone who hasn't made this before, you have to use Japanese short grain rice instead of normal rice. Once it's cooked add in rice vinegar and sugar.



Here's a nori roll with a good layer of rice.



And then here's some of the first kind of filling.



This is the finished product (pre-cutting) and man it looks nice!



This is one of Megan making a reverse nori roll. To make this one you need to cover the mat in plastic wrap, cover a roll in rice, and then flip it over and put the fillings on top.



The final product of both types is shown below.



Normally the Japanese would dip their sushi in soy sauce and then eat a piece of pickled ginger afterwords to cleanse the palette, but personally I prefer to put wasabi and ginger on top of my roll and eat all at once.

Pizza Night

We've had a long running tradition of making our own pizzas at home rather than ordering out or using frozen. There's a ridiculous number of toppings, sauces, and crusts you can mix together for a perfect pizza that will satisfy anyone's palette. Some of our personal favorites are buffalo chicken, cheeseburger (complete with pickles!), and apple and Gorgonzola. Megan and I were looking through some old cooking magazines we hadn't used in awhile and found an issue of Vegetarian Times featuring an amazing looking veggie pizza on the cover. Below is a picture tour of our attempts to recreate it.

First up is my amazingly hot wife cutting up some veggies. We used zucchini, yellow squash, orange bell pepper, red onion, and grape tomatoes.



Here's a picture of all of the veggies used and the magazine cover that inspired us.



Then we made the sauce, which was made with garlic and butter instead of the traditional tomato based sauce.



Here's my pie rolling out the crust!



This doesn't really need a picture, but I love documenting our cooking experiences. Here's the lemon water we made (oh so refreshing!) to go with our meal.



After setting down the garlic sauce we made a thin cover of mozzarella cheese.



And laying down the veggie toppings...



Here's all of the toppings down, including the red pepper flakes on top to give it some kick.



And finally the finished cooked product, which was then devoured messily.




All in all, a successful meal!

The Great Lobster Extravaganza!

For those who didn't know, the Great Lobster Extravaganza is the biggest event (of any variety) of the entire year! Spanning two separate apartments and feeding a full four people past the point of fullness, the Great Lobster Extravaganza was a rousing success!

OK, so basically it was just Matt's birthday and we wanted to re-create a meal we'd had at Red Lobster once, but it was still pretty damn awesome. The meal consisted of marinated steaks with a crab/lobster topping, broiled lobster tail, asparagus in butter sauce, mashed potatoes, salad, and a desert of cheesecake with sour cream and fruit topping.

We started out by slicing open the steaks, stuffing them with garlic, and then marinating them in A1 "Savory Onion and Black Pepper" sauce for a full day. When the time for the meal itself came we started by preparing the lobster, which is actually pretty fun. We cut open the top shell so we could pour a butter sauce over it and then snipped the little feet off for a prettier presentation.







After that Matt got mad at the oven mitt for some reason...



Next we made the sauce for the lobster, which was just a basic butter/garlic/pepper mixture. The asparagus got cooked up in olive oil, butter, balsamic vinegar, and pepper. Fattening to be sure, but delicious beyond belief.






For the steak topping we pulled a little of the lobster meat out and then mixed it with Surimi (fake crab) and cooked it in butter and pepper.





Then I got mad at Matt for some reason, only I went for a knife instead of a finger....



My pie cooked up the steaks on the stove in more marinade to make them juicy, then finished them up on the George Foreman to make the cooking go faster.




And now for a Lobster before and after shot!






The dinner table all set up...



And then the super sexy finished product!



And once the meal proper was done, we hoofed it over to Jake's to feast on his amazing cheesecake. He said the secret ingredient was "Love," which I took to mean semen, but it was still good.