"Sushi"

Living in a small town in a landlocked state makes it tough to find good sushi.

We have:

• A Chinese restaurant with buffet sushi (all cooked fish sitting out next to a tray of wasabi paste)
• A Chinese restaurant who has been accused of fishing local lakes for "sushi" fish
• A Chinese restaurant who recently renovated their building and doubled their prices
• A grocery store that makes it in the morning and keeps it in the cooler with their cheeses all day.

Now, I don't have a refined sushi palate, so I'm not ashamed to admit that I've eaten from every one of those options previously - and enjoyed most of them. It's just... I've always wanted more. Also, I've always wanted to be that guy who makes his own sushi whenever he wants. 

So yesterday - while Shelly and the kids were out - I decided to do just that. 

Knowing absolutely nothing about making sushi, I remembered a video I had stumbled across months ago promoting a product called the "Sushi Bazooka". 

If there's a more authentic name for a sushi making kit, I'd be surprised. So, earlier this week, I had found it on Amazon and ordered it. 

Surprisingly though, while I ordered the "Sushi Bazooka", what I got in the mail was "Sushezi" - a similar looking product, with directions ONLY in French.

(I would find out later that all of the one star reviews for the product said the same thing - that they had received a different product than what they ordered.)

 Probably should have been a red flag.  

I can roll with the punches though, so I figured "What the heck... let's make some sushi!" 

I went to Walmart and got all of the things that I thought I would need (after googling "How to make easy sushi). 

Since I didn't have time to go to the fish market in Tulsa, I decided to start out easy. I bought sushi rice, imitation crab meat, cucumber, sriracha mayo, and sushi wraps (Nori, I believe, for the uninitiated). 

At this point in the story, I feel like I need to introduce one of its major players: 

Turk. 

Turk is my HUGE cat that I've had since grad school. I have spoiled Turk through years of giving him treats whenever I make food for me that I think he might also like. There are certain kitchen sounds that send him absolutely bolting from whatever part of the house he's in. 

Unfortunately, one of those sounds is the sliding noise that the cutting board makes whenever it's pulled from the cabinet where we keep it. It doesn't matter what you're cutting (in this case, cucumbers) - he just knows that if the board is out, he's eating something. 

So, as my sushi rice is cooking (in my brand new rice cooker, also ordered earlier this week), I started cutting up my cucumbers - Turk yowling the entire time. It doesn't matter if I lower the board to the floor to prove to him that I'm not cutting meat, he just keeps going. 

When the rice finished cooking, I set to work on my "sushi". 

I loaded the bazooka with rice, strips of crab meat, and slices of cucumber. I closed the (poorly Amazon rated) hinges, loaded the plunger, and began to "extrude". 

The aptly named Sushi Bazooka (or "Sushezi" here) spit out a roll of sushi that immediately fell apart as soon as it hit the wrapping. 

The thing about sushi rice though, as opposed to regular rice, is that it's VERY sticky. So, when you ignorantly go to correct a mistake with your bare hands, more comes back with you than you leave at the scene of the accident. 

I begin cussing to myself as I'm now trying to get sticky sushi rice of of my hands while Turk continues to meow at me, beckoning me to give him some of whatever it is that I'm making. 

I chase Turk off, holding my hands vertical like a pre-surgery surgeon waiting for his gloves - but years of spoiling this cat has made any threat I make an easily called bluff - so he makes a quick loop and returns. 

The only thing missing from the next 30 minutes was the Benny Hill song - just a sped up video of me: loading the gun, packing it tight, forgetting the plunger, re-opening the gun, putting the plunger in, extruding a soft mess of "sushi", Turk meowing, me chasing him off, repeating the process. 

I cussed the gun, I cussed the cat, I cussed Amazon, I cussed the French. It was a mess - and nothing like the 'elegant' process I expected making sushi to be.  

Finally, I was able to get something resembling a roll of sushi squirted out onto the seaweed wrap (which I had to double up, because Walmart sushi wraps are not of the highest quality - who knew?) - and I rolled that thing up like the world's ugliest burrito. 

I slowly cut it into pieces (sticky, remember?), poured my soy sauce, got my wasabi, and sat down to eat. 

Here's the thing though... even well made sushi often wants to fall apart when it's dipped in soy sauce. 

The same can definitely be said for poorly wrapped sushi burritos. 

As I sat in my dark front room, hate-eating this ugly monstrosity - I decided I should probably leave sushi making up to the pros (as relative as that word may be around here).


I felt like Dr. Steve Bruhl.

2/10 - Would not Sushezi again.