Sushi: kappa-maki and the art of "Wait, we were supposed to do what?"

I've finally gotten around to making sushi. With the help of a library book I am now boiling the sushi rice. My favorite kind of sushi, cucumber rolls, are the main course for tonight along with the ever classic miso soup.

Tonight I'm cooking for quite a few more people than usual, my cousins, aunt, and their grandma came up from Corvallis for-guess what? Sushi! To celebrate their birthdays.

I'm hoping their second sushi meal of the day is the better one. Of course there's plenty of misgiving that we got the right ingredients, we read as much Japanese as we have cooked miso soup!

Sushi is an odd kind of food to blog about. When you have a break to blog there's nothing to blog about, I mean who wants to read about somebody boiling rice whilst dissolving sugar and salt into rice vinegar? Not me, I can assure you. Then, when your chopping the cucumber and rolling the cucumber rolls you don't have the time to blog.

Ultimately, though despite many setbacks, dad and I fell into a rhythm, he compiled and rolled the kappa-maki and I cut them. Cutting sushi is not the easiest thing ever, its round, soft, porous-ness just wants to collapse under the knife and the deep green of the nori doesn't want to slice, it wants to rip, tear, and distribute the other ingredients all over your clothes.

The cucumber rolls were good as was the miso soup yet everything was far from perfect, I imagine it was a bit like a Japanese family trying their hand at lasagna, meatloaf or some other very western dish. But it was quite good for Cy, he'd had a stuffy nose all day but when he bit into a wasabi covered cucumber roll three things happened, his cheeks became redder than a rose, steam shot out of his ears, he chugged a glass of water and his nose decided it was a good idea to stop being stuffy. For the next ten minutes right now I can hear his screams from the dining room as he stuffs still more wasabi into his mouth. It's a wonder all that steam hasn't fried his brain yet.

I'm going to have to try this again now that I know what its basics are. I'm also going to need mom to get her knives sharpened...