Soirée sushi

This one's for you, Dad!**


Who knew making sushi was so easy?...Amélie did!

Bastien's sister, Amélie, was visiting us last week and had some seriously ambitious culinary plans -- pissaladière ratée (failed onion tart) notwithstanding -- for her séjour (stay) in Macau. "On peut faire des makis!" ("We can make maki rolls!") she said excitedly over the phone a week or so before her arrival. Hmmm, I thought...

France is like a culinary Disneyland for me, an endless chemin (road) of delicious discovery. Around every bend is another local, regional, artisanal, traditional, ancestral cheese, pâté, bread, wine, jam, honey, ham...you get the idea. So, though I love sushi, eating Japanese was far from my mind and making it myself was even further. But Amélie was determined, and who was I to stop a good thing? So we set off on a circuitous route to Euroasie (the Kam Man of Bordeaux--a Disneyland in its own right but of rice noodles and banana chutney and all food Asian) in search of the necessary ingredients: seaweed, rice wine vinegar, sushi rice, maki mat, wasabi, soy sauce, pickled ginger, cucumber, avocado, and, of course, the fish (saumon/salmon, merlue/hake, and crevettes/shrimp) from our local and very chatty poissonnier (fishmonger). Oh, and lest we forget the Kirin.

Quite a few hours and euros later, we found ourselves back at home and ready to start preparing our festin (feast). Amélie had already made sushi once or twice before, so she took the reins and got to work cooking the rice (probably the hardest thing to get right), chopping the veggies, and finessing the fish into perfect pieces for maki and nigiri. Once all the prep was done, we set to work assembling the rolls:


And look at what a beautiful spread we created (I say we, but Amélie deserves most of the credit)!!


Miam miam (yum yum)!! We set to work with our baguettes (chopsticks; I am endlessly amused by the number of references to and metaphors for bread and wine there are in the French language...perhaps the subject of a future post!) and filled our bellies with sushi made in France.

**For those of you who have ever eaten sushi with George (or have heard stories), you know how seriously my dad takes his tekkamaki. "Shhhh!" he says, holding his hand up to stop you mid-sentence as he slides a piece of saba (mackerel, one of his favorites) gently into his mouth. Then closing his eyes and chewing slowly, he inhales deeply to get the full sensation of the flavor. You don't even think to interrupt, as you can see just how much he is enjoying this culinary experience. "The last bite is the worst," he always says, because it means there is no more sushi left! If my dad were to subscribe to a religion, it might just be sushi. I think we can safely say that we are a family of gourmands. Bon appétit!