Weekend Cookbok Challenge #8

I like to participate in these food blog challenges, but I seldom have the time. When you have been cooking as long as I have you sometimes get in a rut of using the same techniques, the same ingredients, the same mind set. The food blog challenges and the food blogs themselves have turned out to be such a source of inspiration. It helps keep me fresh and it helps me keep the menus at the restaurant fresh.

This theme was something foriegn to you from a cookbook you already owned. It is being hosted by Ruth-visit her blog at onceuponafeast.blogspot.com. I chose Sushi Secrets by Kazuko Masui and Chihiro Masui. I love sushi, but it is not one of the stronger suits in my repertory of cooking. My first encounter with sushi was in the early 80's and I had moved to Arkansas from Chicago(which is another long story), but I took a job at the Dillard's department store and one of the seamstresses in the alterations department was a Japanese lady who brought a platter of sushi to share. I remeber it being gorgeous to look at-most co-workers were afraid to indulge-I just pulled up a chair in front of the platter and ate half of it. A strange initiation to shushi to say the least.

Another informative brush with sushi came when I moved next door to a Japanese family and the mama san taught me to make the vinegared rice-I can still she her fanning the rice as she gently folded cool air into it. She really stressed the fanning component-it makes the rice shiny and glisten.

From then on my sushi learning experience has been mostly autodidactic, until last year when I hired Jason. Jason had done a stint as the sushi chef at St Louis Fishmarket which is a seafood restaurant that I like alot even if I can't afford to eat there often. Jason taught me about sushi knives-which I haven't purchased yet. I think my sushi looks a bit clunky and not as polished as I would like. My inexperience with sushi has alot do do with it, but I don't have the proper knives I have German knives Henkels and Wustoffs mostly. I am seeing another extravagant knife purchse in my near future.