Tuesday was our very first experiment with homemade sushi.  Sort of.  It was an adventure with new ingredients (new to our house, not to our stomachs), but it probably only counts as 90% sushi.  I’m kind of a wuss, which explains the 10% non-sushi.  Lucky for us, Giada saw my wussiness coming a mile away and told me in her cookbook that using cooked shrimp instead of raw salmon would be just fine.  I cooked up a whole pound of shrimp, which might have been overkill.  It sure was tasty overkill.

I couldn’t bring myself to trust raw salmon from a giant bag of frozen salmon, you see.  I don’t think it’s quite sushi grade.  Also, don’t be intimidated by putting wasabi paste into a recipe.  I was.  Turns out that when you mix a small amount into a large set of ingredients, it just adds flavor, not heat.  I like flavor.  Scott likes heat, so he threw some on top of his food, too.

Other than the flavor, do you know what my favorite thing is about this recipe?  The rolling method.  Giada told me to roll the food up like an ice cream cone.  Now that’s a mental image I understand!  It worked like a charm, and it didn’t matter that I forgot to trim the asparagus.  The bottom of the asparagus just sealed up the bottom of the nori cone.  Perfect.

Thanks, Giada!

Beautiful little nori, shrimp, rice, and asparagus ice cream cones.

We also took the opportunity on Tuesday to save some flowers before the frost hit overnight.  It was a fortuitous save.

(Links aren’t working super well in this post, but you can click on any of the pictures of the sushi to get to Giada’s recipe.)