making maki

Growing up, one of n and my favorite meals was making maki sushi. A maki is a type of sushi, a hand roll in a cone shape. Kind of like ice cream. Except the cone is nori, or dry roasted seaweed. (Of course, back then, our maki rolling skills were next to none, so we ended up making cylindrical sushi most of the time.)

The way we make the sushi isn't exactly traditional--being Taiwanese, we had to put add things like pork sung (which is a Taiwanese dry shredded pork with a savory sweet taste--we love this stuff! We put this in everything! N even has a humongous jar of it in her apartment!). My mom also likes to put salmon skin and imitation crab.

We were ambitious one day and decided to make this together with our friends, with limited resources. This is what we included:

• Rice (look below on how to make sushi rice!)
• Nori sheets, halved
• Masago with mayonnaise (salmon roe mixed with mayonnaise. Mmm cholesterol.)
• Shredded carrots
• Shredded cucumbers
• Tamago (Japanese sweet egg omelet; I will also detail how to make this!)
• Spam (this girl insisted on putting spam haha)
• Sriracha (a Vietnamese chili sauce--also her idea)
• Fish sung (I didn't have pork sung at the time--n was quite disappointed)

To make sushi rice (a lot of it is trial and error, taste and season. This is how my mom taught us):

1. Make short grain, white rice in a rice cooker! (I don't know how to make it any other way...sorry!)
2. Take out the rice, and preferably outside, add some white granulated sugar and rice vinegar and stir in the wind! (I think the reasoning behind stirring in the wind is to cool the rice down as you mix the ingredients; I do have fond memories of my mother yelling at us that we didn't have enough wind in our rice.)
3. Taste. If it's not sweet or vinegar-y enough, add more! Always start off with just a little bit (relative to how much rice you have)--you can always add more later!

To make tamago:

1. Beat however many eggs you want until they are well mixed and fluffy (don't overbeat!).
2. Add some sugar (some is also relative to the number of eggs you have) and mix again.
3. Add oil to a hot pan, swirl, and turn the heat down to medium.
4. Pour in some of the mixture.
5. As it starts to cook, push it to one side of the pan and add more of the mixture.
6. Repeat until it's cooked!

As with the other ingredients, you want to make sure the egg is cut into medium size strips, so it can fit in your maki!

Once the ingredients are assembled, you can start making your maki! Take a sheet of nori, put a small ball of rice on the sheet and carefully spread it. You don't want to put too much, or your maki won't roll! Then add small amounts of whatever else you want. Then roll!

Mmm.

Edit 3/11:


Here's another picture of a time we were more ambitious--we mixed imitation crab with Kewpie, a Japanese mayonnaise (I totally recommend buying this) and also added takuwan, a Japanese pickled radish.