Curmudgeonly Cooking: MAKI

I've never had a blog before so I don't know how to start this.  So, I guess I'll just start with a recipe.

My friend Shaunna asked me to make this blog because she wanted to steal all of my recipes and masquerade around town flaunting them as her own.

This is her:

What a bitch.

 Most of the time I have sworn her to secrecy, which makes this blog even more oddball-ish than it already is.

TONIGHT'S MEAL:

Vegetarian Maki rolls

This is the first time I've made maki rolls or any maki like product.  Let's see how they turned out.

That's my boyfriend's greedy hand snatching a piece while I take the picture.  Note his unprofessional manner of eating these guys.  Using his hands.  Disgusting Americans!

So maki isn't too hard to make.  Simple meals like this are why I love to cook.  Even though cooking really isn't that hard, people seem to absolutely abhor it.  I attribute this solely to laziness, bad upbringing and a weak palate.  The great thing about cooking--besides that food is delicious--is that no matter what you make or what recipe you're following, the meal is always uniquely your own.  So if you're one of those lazy people who can't manage to throw a meal together that didn't first come from a box, I have pretty much concluded that you're an incredibly boring and uninteresting person with an incredibly dull life and futile existence.  Nothing.

Back to the maki.

Here's what you need:

For the rice:


2 cups sushi rice (you can find this pretty much anywhere.  I got mine at crappy crappy Jewel).
3 cups water
1/2 cup rice vinegar (also from crappy crappy Jewel...in the ASIAN section)
1 tbsp olive oil or any other oil you want
1/4 cup white sugar
1 tsp salt

So this is pretty easy.  It's going to take you about twenty minutes all together to make this, which is actually nice because while the rice is cooking you can prepare everything else.  In the culinary world, this is called multi-tasking.

So get our your colander and throw in your rice.  Rinse it off until the water runs clear.  Use cold water.  Throw your rice into a sauce pan (I find it easier to use the sauce pan for the future...) and add the water. Cover that shit up and throw your stove on high blast.  Give it a minute or two until the water boils and knock it down to a simmer.  And then forget about it.

In a small pot, add the remaining ingredients--vinegar, oil, sugar and salt.  Just a little FYE, I thought the rice turned out a little too vinegary, so I would recommend using just under 1/2 cup.  I couldn't figure out how to write JUST UNDER 1/2 CUP in the ingredients.  Read on.   Put on a very low heat and cover.  Ignore to the fullest extent.

Here's what I put in the maki:


1 cucumber
1 avocado
A handful of scallions
Cream cheese
Jalapeno 

While your rice is cooking, chop this shit up!  What you want to do is make everything as pliable as possible.  So, cut everything in strands.

Like this!

If this is too healthy for you, you might want to reconsider eating maki all together and stick with hamburgers, french fries and obesity.

Let's assume by this time all the water is gone in your sauce pan and your rice is tender and ready.  Now, take the vinegar mixture and add it to the rice, stirring to let the rice and vinegar cool down while the rice absorbs the extra liquid.  Let this cook while you get yourself all psyched up.

If you have a sushi mat, that's great.  It looks something like this:

Actually, it looks EXACTLY like that.  Hey oh!

If you have this, wrap it in some plastic wrap.  If you don't have a sushi mat, you're shit out of luck and you just wasted your time and money on a recipe you probably won't like anyway.

Or you could calm down for a second and use some wax paper or parchment paper or notebook paper.  (Skip the notebook paper.  That was a joke.).  It won't be as easy, but it works just fine.

If you don't know how to roll a sushi roll or can't figure it out, I would recommend looking it up on youtube.  I'm not going to explain the whole process because I'm lazy and my boyfriend keeps interrupting my furious typing as I try to pop this recipe out.

It should start to look like this:

Make sure you put all of the veggies in there evenly and to leave space on each side of the rice so you can successfully roll the, well, roll.

NOTE:  I did not use any sort of seaweed, soy paper or what have you for this.  Normally, one would use these things, spread the rice evenly on them and flip them over (rice side down) on the mat and fill them with delicious ingredients.  I am both cheap and lazy, so instead I put the rice directly on the mat in a rectangular shape and put the ingredient on top of the rice.  This works BRILLIANTLY.  Don't let the asians try to convince you otherwise. 

So do your roll thing and when you're done rolling each maki, I would recommend rolling them in some plastic wrap and sticking them in the fridge for 10 minutes or so.   Like so:

 When you decide to cut them up, I recommend unrolling them a little so you have some plastic off of them and cut them up while still in the plastic wrap.

SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.

Now you might ask what else to eat with it.  I recommend on a cold winter's night such as tonight some noodles.  This is something you can throw together while you leave the maki in the fridge for ten minutes.

NOODLES IN BROTH

Here's what you need:


3 cups veggie broth (or chicken broth or whatever)
2 tbsp soy sauce (or tamara or if you're a hippie vegan Braggs)
2 tbsp chili sauce (the asian kind, not hot sauce or other crap you having lying around)
1 clove minced garlic
Optional: A few slices of fresh ginger


Noodles, such as egg noodles or ramen noodles.  Anything that looks thin and squirrely. 


Toss all the stuff together minus the noodles and bring to a boil.  Then, take off the heat and let cool for 1 minute.  Toss in the noodles while it is cooling down and let them sit in there for 5 minutes or so.  Then, throw them back on the burner on a simmer and cook the noodles through.  They'll be done in ten minutes.  Serve them in a bowl with just a tad bit of the broth, like so:

Isn't that a miracle?

And there you have it.  Maki and noodles for dinner.

 Like me, you can feel better about yourself now that you know you wasted your day watching People's Court instead of getting any exercise or sun.

Don't forgot to top it off with some fruit for dessert (like I did, with some grapefruit) and a glass of whole milk.