Healthy Recipe 2: The Katie Roll

I have to be honest with everyone, this was a completely impromptu entry. I had QUITE a few recipes that I could have picked from honestly, but this week I pretty much managed to exist on a completely different plane than everyone else. This week has been one of those weeks where I just completely checked out and didn't feel like doing anything. So when the thought came to my mind that I needed to eat tonight, I decided that I was going to be ballsy and make sushi. I know...completely out of the blue right? Now...sushi is something that takes a really long time to learn to make right. I mean in Japan, making sushi is like an art. You don't just buy ingredients at the store and be like "I'm going to make excellent sushi tonight", like I did. I once heard that learning to make the sushi RICE takes 7 years to perfect. For me, tonight was my first go and I really have to say, I'm impressed with myself.

I mean of course it's not restaurant quality. If you want restaurant quality then go pay $15 per person and see where that gets you. I mean I barely have enough money to support my grocery bill so I really can't afford to be hauling off to a sushi place every week to get my fix. So I purchased some nori (toasted seaweed. Comes in sheets. It's the greenish black wrap in most sushi rolls) and some more crab stick, and I just so happened to have a little tiny bit of cream cheese left and randomly enough...some asparagus....and I threw this together. I call it...the Katie Roll! Ok I'm sure that this has been made before and has been called something else. But the sheer ghetto-ness of this roll makes it a Katie Roll.

Let me just tell you how to make it since this might take some explaining. It's my own recipe, I didn't get it from anywhere...I just kind of made it up on the spot with what I had in my pantry.

Ingredients:

1. Nori, you can find this in the Asian section of your grocery store. Maybe not WalMart because WalMart is a fail in the selection department, but I got mine at Albertson's.
2. Sushi Rice, my brand is Botan Calrose rice. This you CAN find in the Asian part of your WalMart. You must use this kind of rice because it is very....sticky. And it helps hold together the sushi.
3. Crab stick, I found this at WalMart. I can't really explain to you WHERE I found it. It was in a case right next to the frozen fish section.
4. Asparagus
5. Cream cheese.

Directions:

1. First you must cook your rice. I did mine in rice cooker. 1 cup to 2 cups water and turned it on and let it do its thing. You can cook your rice in the traditional way as well, on the stove. Pretty much the same process except my rice cooker is faster. I seasoned the water the rice was cooking in with some salt.
2. After rice is cooked, put it into a bowl and put in the refrigerator for 20 minutes so that it is cooled.
3. Take the rice out and place your sheet of nori on a paper towel. Usually you would use a bamboo mat for this, but as I said, this was totally freestyle so I didn't have a bamboo mat. Paper towel worked fine.
4. Wet your spoon (it is important to keep wetting the spoon because the rice is like glue. It sticks to everything and will not cooperate if you don't keep your utensils wet) and spoon out some rice onto the nori, spreading it out evenly across the sheet. This is why it is important to cool the rice because if the rice is too wet and hot it will disintegrate the nori. You want your nori to have a nice layer of rice on it.
5. Place your crab stick on the side of the nori closest to you. If your crab stick is long and fits on the nori nicely, leave it. If your crab stick is short, cut it in half so that it fits on the whole thing.
6. Cut the tips off your asparagus and place them next to the crab stick.
7. Now, block cream cheese would be ideal for this, so cut off a strip of cream cheese and set that on top of the crab stick and asparagus.
8. Now this is the hard part. Grab the paper towel and fold the nori over the ingredients to make a roll. Keep rolling until the nori meets itself. The rice should be sticky enough to adhere to itself, but in case it's not, apply a little water onto the seam of rice to make it stick.
9. Squeeze the roll gently to make sure all of the nori is filled.
10. Take a sharp knife and wet it. Carefully trim off the ends. You don't want to go hog wild with this because then you're going to break your roll. You MUST wet the knife.
11. Now, slice the roll into pieces. Remember to keep wetting the knife in between each cut. That is very important.

Well now the roll is done, but you may add some garnish to this. A popular sauce that people use often in sushi restaurants, at least here in America is Japanese Mayo. Or as my favorite sushi place, Yujin Japanese Restaurant calls it, "white sauce". Now I think that Yujin makes theirs differently, but maybe not....I have figured out by taste testing many samples of Japanese mayo over the years that it is made with mayonnaise, white sugar and sriracha sauce. Just put a dollop of mayo in a container, put a teaspoon of sugar and a squirt of sriracha, mix it all up well and you're cooking with gas. That's the sauce for the top of this sushi.

Now I think that this recipe is pretty healthy. I know what some of you are thinking, "Katie can't eat white rice". You're right. I can't. And I'm going to be paying for that later. But I love sushi so much and so do many other people who can indeed have white rice. So I wanted to post that. I didn't use very much cream cheese because well....I didn't have very much left. But you shouldn't use a lot anyway. This is not a cream cheese roll, the main flavor is the rice and crab with a nice crunch from the asparagus roll. The sauce, since it is made out of mayo and sugar is very unhealthy. So you can omit that if you want and have it plain. I had mine plain. I just drizzled it on top for the picture and wiped it off after! Haha!

I hope that this is a good recipe for you guys to try. If anything it is FUN to make. If eating sushi is not your thing then you probably won't want to use this recipe. But since it is very popular here...I thought it was worth a shot. Have a great night all! If you have any questions let me know!

Live Long and Prosper,

The Hungry Hungry Health Nut