Sushi Making Class

Hi there. How've you been? I feel like it's been forever since I've written, and a lot has transpired since that last lunchbox I packed for my daughter back in June. As I alluded to last month, my husband and I signed up for a sushi making class that we took several weeks ago.

Let me cut right to the chase: WE HAD THE BEST TIME! I'm so glad to have discovered a wonderful little culinary school called Chef Eric's Culinary Classroom.  Our teacher was none other than Eric himself.  He's a very likeable guy and has an interesting story of how he entered the culinary field.  I do have a particular interest in career change stories, so I enjoyed hearing his. But onto the class.

Chef Eric taught us all about sushi for the first half of the class and conducted a few cooking demonstrations, which we could see perfectly, thanks to the mirror above his table. I learned some very interesting tidbits, most notably that real wasabi root is generally $100+ a pound!  Lucky for us, Chef Eric found about $30 worth of it in the market that morning so we got to taste it. I didn't realize, but I guess most of the time in sushi restaurants, we aren't eating real, pure wasabi root.  I'm not entirely sure what we're eating, but I definitely tasted the difference.  The real thing is much more subtle than anything I've ever had in a sushi restaurant. To be honest, I like both "forms" of wasabi, but had no idea where it came from. 

Then we moved into the kitchen to cook. We made sushi rice, pickled ginger (a personal favorite) and then prepared our very own sushi rolls and sashimi.  It was well into the 9 o'clock hour at this point and both Jeremy and I were definitely hungry and tired, but still having fun. By about 9:30 we finally put down our knives, washed up and stood around a beautiful table of sushi that our class made together. 

This was merely a sampling of the sushi we made (there was more)

I've got to be honest, I wasn't expecting it to taste as good as what we've enjoyed at sushi restaurants. I don't know why, but I wasn't, and boy was I wrong. It was delicious!! None of us could believe that we'd made this ourselves. But we did. And it was good.

I'm not going to say that sushi will become a part of our weekly rotation of family dinners at home (buying sushi-grade fish at 4 in the morning isn't top on our priority list), but I certainly learned a lot of neat cooking tips.  For example, I'd always struggled to get the skin off of fresh ginger when using it in stir fry recipes, but struggle no more. I learned the proper technique, which is to use the dull side of the knife and simply scrape it against the skin going in the opposite direction of it. Just like that, it comes off. Brilliant.

All in all, our sushi making class was a fun thing to do together, a great way to start the weekend and a true lesson in appreciating the work that goes into beautiful meal preparation.

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To be honest, I like both "forms" of wasabi, but had no idea where it came from. -Prada Sneakers for less