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Recipe: dragon roll sushi

The Daring Cooks are making sushi this month! We have done quite a bit of sushi making (and more eating) here at urb so I was quite excited for the selection. Even with the familiarity, I was hard pressed for time to get this done. Because of that, it is with great sadness and yet relief that I am withdrawing from the Daring Cooks. This will be my last DC challenge.

daring cooks – one last cha cha cha!

I really have to thank the ladies of the DARING KITCHEN: beloved Lis of La Mia Cucina and sweet Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice. These two fine women give and give and give to all of the Daring Cooks (and Bakers). I don’t know how they do it, but I admire them for their love and enthusiasm, and especially for their friendship. Thanks, you beautiful babes!

Here’s the official line: 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.

And once again, I colored outside of the lines which is probably why I should be leaving the DCs… I didn’t use their sushi recipe, I used the one I always use because we had a very small window of time to get this done. But I still learned a new technique and the sushi totally rocked (because it always does). I decided to try my hand at tempura frying based on this recipe from Allison who does all things sushi-related.

i thought the egg and ice water looked neat before mixing

whisking the wet and dry ingredients together

I think the biggest barrier to making tempura for me has always been the mystery of how to do it. Allison’s recipe is SUPER easy to throw together and so the true hurdle in tempura is the frying. I hate frying, but the more I do it, the more I lose my dread of it. We decided to tempura fry some alba clamshell mushrooms, asparagus, and shrimp. I didn’t have any softshell crab on hand, but tempura shrimp in a roll is another favorite of mine.

ingredients including: alba mushrooms, masago (fish roe), quail eggs

the goods: maguro (tuna), large dry scallops, wild-caught gulf shrimp

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Recipe: tora no maki roll

Thanksgiving is about food, loved ones, and giving thanks. We have the food in spades, loved ones too – although we’re not with friends or family today. And then there is the thanks. I have a lot to be thankful for.

I got my breast cancer diagnosis just over a year ago, right before Thanksgiving. We were waiting for biopsy results and so Thanksgiving was a bit of a bust. While we had a quiet holiday that year – just me, Jeremy, and the dog – the uncertainty of our future and of my life hung heavily over the day. There was no point in crying, no point in making any plans because all we could do was wait and keep a level head about it. It was surreal, but at the same time I would rather it be me than anyone else I cared about. My treatments turned the past year on its head. Jeremy and I forged through it together, but chemotherapy was an incredibly isolating, dismal, freakish experience: physically, emotionally. While I pride myself in my ability to reach from within for the strength to plod through shitty times, I could not have gotten through it on my own.

I thank every day that I have Jeremy in my life. I will be forever grateful to those loved ones who were there for me when I needed them most. I’m thankful for my tele betties who gave me something to look forward to each week when I began my chemo. I’m thankful for my awesome physicians, nurses, radiation techs, and PT. I’m thankful for the incredible friends I have made (and even met!) through this blog and for all of the use real butter readers who make me laugh and cry and laugh some more. And lastly, I am thankful to be alive and relatively well. Well enough to hit the slope today…

getting my tele legs back this morning

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Recipe: not so special roll

When Jeremy and I moved in together after I graduated from college, I cooked a lot… but I didn’t cook. There wasn’t much need to because we lived within spitting distance of more authentic ethnic dining establishments than I could shake a stick at. We were spoiled rotten. And all of the ethnic grocery stores in LA made it just as easy to get some of the homestyle goodies to take home and heat up. Very nice.

sushi rice

special nori from japan, courtesy of joyce

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