Gourmet Weekend

I said I was feeling like doing a little cooking, and so I did. Not Friday night. Friday night I worked late and then I went running, so by the time I got home, it was really late. That night we ate a dinner so un-gourmet and processed that I don’t even want to admit to having consumed it.

Saturday and Sunday were a whole different story. On Saturday I went out and bought a whole mess of food. John has been bugging me to try making sushi at home for a while. Frederick has many delights, but a restaurant that serves his two favorite kinds of sushi isn’t one of them. I’d resisted the idea though. Sushi always seemed to be one of those items like spring rolls or croissants. Sure, I can make them, but isn’t it a whole lot easier to pay someone else to do it? But John really wanted to try it, so try it we did.

We started with the rice. Making proper sushi rice is way more work than just making regular rice. First you have to rinse it several times. Then you have to drain it. Then you have to let it sit in the water for 30 minutes before you start cooking it. Once it is “done” you’re supposed to let it sit for another 15 minutes. And you still aren’t finished! Then you have to spread it in a wide flat bowl and mix sushi vinegar (essentially rice vinegar and sugar) in it and wait for it to cool. I had no idea they were going through all that at sushi restaurants! Of course, while all that is happening, you can be getting your fillings ready. One new lesson I’ve learned – tempura batter gets everywhere. The second lesson I learned is that my husband is a sushi making genius! Seriously, you should see the rolls he made. They are beautiful, with pinwheels and swirls, and also very tasty. Using the various ingredients we’d prepared, he made vegetable tempura sushi, cucumber cream/cheese roll, potato/onion/cream cheese roll, and a vegetable inside out roll. It was very impressive. I was reading the directions for assembling the inside out roll and getting confused, and he just naturally intuited the way to do it that made sense. John could usually care less about cooking (although he is an appreciative eater) so it was a lot of fun to make stuff together.

Tonight we had fake chicken & veggie fajitas, sweet corn cakes, and mini-chocolate tarts with strawberries. I made the marinade, the tortillas, the corn cakes, and the tarts. I never knew making tortillas was so easy. I’m definitely going to do that again. They were way yummier than the ones you get at the store. And much healthier, too, with no preservatives, high fructose corn syrup or partially hydrogenated whatever. They were the flour kind. The recipe for the corn tortillas said you needed a tortilla press, which I don’t have. Plus, I wasn’t sure whether masa harina was corn flour or corn meal, or even what the difference is between the two, so it’s probably better to wait until that question it answered. And I was already making the sweet corn cakes.

The marinade ended up being a little spicier than I would have preferred – I put in a bit too much cayenne – but still good. And all pretty darn healthy too. Well, except for the mini-tarts, but they are mini. I know it sounds like a lot of work, and it was, and for that matter, I still have some pans to wash, but it was what I wanted to do with my time, and I loved every minute of it.

I also managed to fit in running on Friday and Sunday, an early morning hike in the woods with John and Seamus, and a workout with weights. John took care of some laundry, and I ran a bunch of errands that needed running. This was one heck of a satisfying weekend.

How was yours?