Japanese Make-In

Last night, I spent two whole hours preparing dinner.

For the last month or so, I've been slowly collecting the things I need to make a full Japanese meal. I bought tofu, sushi salmon from my local (and awesome) fish market, nori (seaweed), pickled ginger. While visiting Alma Mater on Saturday, I talked Andrew into stopping at the massive world gourmet food store, and I found the seasoning for miso soup, something that had been quite elusive in Iowa.

On Sunday afternoon, when Andrew and I were lamenting that we had nothing left in our fridge, I realized that if we added a cucumber and an avacado to my list, we could have one heck of a dinner.

Around five or six, I started with rinsing the sushi rice and throwing it into the rice cooker. Then I cracked the eggs and started following the directions for making a Japanese omlette for what I think is called "tomago" (which I am sure translates in Japanese to "mmmmmm!"). It took 5 eggs and we ended up with 4 pieces of sushi out of that, but to my absolute shock, it turned out perfectly. I cut up the cucumber, salmon, and avacado for rolls, toasted the nori, seasoned the rice, rolled everything up, heated up the miso, cubed the tofu -

- and two hours later, I emerged covered in sticky rice with a platter of 5 pieces of salmon california inside-out rolls, 5 pieces of cucumber rolls, 2 pieces of salmon sushi, and 2 pieces of egg sushi, and two bowls of miso soup (and a container of leftovers). Before serving this masterpiece to my husband, I took pictures. While I love to cook, even I could recognize that I probably won't be doing this again soon.

It tasted great and I was very proud of myself (hence the blog about the adventure), but it also dawned on me that two hours is a LONG time to be in the kitchen, and even though Andrew was helping out by washing dishes as I went, there were 4 pans, 3 bowls, 3 cutting boards, 3 knives, 1 fork, 3 mini bowls, and several measuring cups used before we even got to plating the meal - which is a total that I feel is maybe a little overboard for a dinner for two people.

In other words, take-out is probably a lot more cost-effective than make-in.