Practice Makes Perfect

We're making sushi again. I've made sushi twice before, and every time I've been amazed by how incomprehensible the cookbook is. Does everyone have gram measures in their homes except for us? Besides, 20 grams of sugar is not necessarily equivalent in volume to 20 grams of salt! How did we end up with a British - Sushi cookbook anyway? It's kinda funny how the first time I decided to make sushi Dad asked me if I was sure I didn't want to try something easier and then this morning Dad asked if I was sure I didn't want to try something harder. It really is interesting how you can go from completely ignorant to almost an expert so quickly. Fear too, is kind of similar I think. Two other dishes really scared me before, (lasagna & pirogi) but the third time I've made those dishes they didn't seem as scary or exotic or cool. I started cooking and before I had started it seemed like I was done. All the little setbacks are predicted now. The lesson I have learned is that if it seems hard, try it three times, then it might be easy.

The sushi rolls are being cut. Some are sitting on plates, ready to be eaten; others wait to be sliced, their outsides colored either black-green or orange and white. It looks just like plates of sushi in a sushi restaurant. The salmon sashimi looks to be straight out of a restaurant too.

The first course of miso soup was good, but the wakame (the Japanese must have 1000 words for seaweed) was a little thick and a little slimy. Otherwise the miso was good. The sushi though, that was really good. The salmon in the sashimi could have been fattier, and the roe wasn't spread that evenly on the California roll, but it was good. We had to deal with the Sellwood-Moreland sushi dilemma of course but this was by far the best sushi dinner yet! We have a sushi restaurant in our neighborhood that makes really large sushi rolls. They are too big to put in your mouth all at once, but you can't really bite them in half without them falling all over the place. We call that the Sellwood-Moreland sushi dilemma.

The sushi was beautiful and it was free from a lot of the old mistakes that were in the other sushi dinners. Practice really does makes perfect.