Disaster Dinner

"Tuna is Blue

  Merlot are Red

  Sushi is hard

  Let's do carry-out instead"

Above is a picture that was taken at Maru, a great sushi place on the east side of Grand Rapids. There is no question that Eric and I love going out for dinner. But we also have just as much fun cooking food for ourselves. Most of the time our projects turn out great! Last time we got adventurous and tried a new marinade for chicken and made a garlic sautéed broccoli. Our other creations include classics like fried chicken and burgers, spicy jambalaya, stir fry, and quesadillas with any interesting thing we can find to use as filling (my personal favorite being the breakfast themed quesadilla with scrambled egg). 

The last time I was in Grand Rapids, we went out for a beautiful anniversary dinner at a well known Italian restaurant. For this Valentine's day weekend however, we decided to stretch our culinary experience beyond our comfort zone and make sushi. 

How hard could it be? I mean, we had a book written for novices!

The first step was to find a place where we could buy "sushi grade" fish. Nearly all fish at meat markets and grocery stores has been handled in a way that cannot be consumed safely in an uncooked form.  Before this endeavor, Eric and I needed to do some serious research on the possibilities of food poisoning from bad fish and how best to avoid getting sick. On our end, the kitchen had to be neat, spotless, and completely sanitary in every way. But half the battle was finding "safe" fish. So for this select piece of meat we needed to go to a very select store. 

Enter Inboden's Market. I was referred to this store when I asked around at NIU to find out who had made sushi before, and where they got the fish for the raw rolls. We asked to talk directly to the butcher, who showed us the perfect tuna steak to use on our sushi. 

He also gave us some advice on cleaning the utensils and kitchen surfaces. 

This mostly involved washing everything in hot water and rinsing it boiling water. 

The most important step to making sushi is the perfect sushi rice. Now, I am absolutely terrible a cooking rice on the stove. But I tried my hand at some stovetop rice anyway, figuring that if I followed the recipe perfectly, my rice should be fine. 

Well, here was our rice. 

I'm not sure where we went wrong, but it was WAY too soggy to use, and there was just no drying it out. Despite it's less that ideal texture however, we decided to use it anyway. After all, it probably wasn't going to be that bad. 

So we chopped up our ingredients, prepared our bamboo mat, and rolled the first roll.

Here's our final product. Doesn't it look great??

Well unfortunately, it didn't taste nearly as good. 

I will say that the flavors were all there -- we had the right combinations of everything, including that delicious tuna steak! But alas, my rice was just plain wet and downright inedible. After a couple of tries,  we couldn't help but laugh at the state of the kitchen. So much effort for so little gain! After a couple of tries with our rolls, we agreed on cutting our losses, cracking open our Valentine's Day merlot, and popping the rest of the tuna into the oven. 

Luckily once the tuna was baked, our dinner was delicious. However, try to imagine for a moment sharing that fish between two people...needless to say, we were both hungry after our fancy tuna "snack". Thus, we threw in the towel, settled into the living room, tuned into Netflix, and ordered the rest of dinner from Lukulo's. 

And it was delicious. So what did we learn?

1) Just because you read a book about it, doesn't mean you can do it. 

2) You can have fun even when dinner is disastrous. 

3) I am still bad at rice. Seriously, how does one cook rice!? I need a lesson or a rice cooker.  

4) Sushi is better left to the pros. 

In the future, I imagine we'll probably stick to the food we know how to make for all major holidays. However, nothing beats an adventure in the kitchen.