The Supreme Pizza Roll

Yes.  The supreme pizza roll is the result of Pizza Hut and Benihana enjoying too many drinks together last night and making bad decisions.  This, my friends is good late night drunk food (though I would not make this drunk, do it before the consumption begins).

Eating a hot slice of pizza at 2am after closing was a great memory (blurry at times) from college.  What was better was having a couple slices cold the next day for lunch.  Imagine rolling up day old cold pizza and slicing it into 6 pieces.  I'll take two please...

Sushi Tools of the Trade

A blacksmith has his hammer and blast furnace.  A lawyer has his pen and pinstripe suit.  An IT consultant has his laptop.  Every trade has their common tools they use to make their job function or make it easier.  Its one of the many things that separates us from animals.

This article will go over the few unique tools you will need to construct your sushi creations.  While you can make sushi with your bare hands, these tools make it much easier and enjoyable.

The Bacon & Eggs Roll

The best way to start your day is with a healthy combination of carbs, protein and vegetables.  The first meal of the day helps you power through the morning and eat less in the draining hours of the afternoon.  Eating a balanced simple breakfast will help you loose weight as well.

Bacon and Eggs is a classic American breakfast that is usually eaten with some sort of carb like toast or hash browns.  This roll gives you an American tradition packed into six bite size pieces for the man (or woman) on the go.

The California Roll

The California roll is regarded as one of most popular and well known varieties of maki-zushi in the United States and maybe even globally.  Every time my wife and I go out of sushi (not as often as I like), we get one of these.  It is the minimum level in a sushi order.

This is a good roll to start with if you are a beginner to making sushi because its ingredients are fairly common and cheap.  This version of the California roll will use fake crab meat because it is readily available in most supermarkets around the US and it is less expensive stuff.  However, if you want the true taste of California, you will get the real stuff.

How to Make Sushi Rice

One of the most important components of sushi is the sushi rice.  Light sticky rice grains form an easily pliable material that binds and gives structure to the sushi roll.  Sushi rice is also the main source of carbs in a sushi dish.

Master sushi chefs like Masaharu Morimoto spent years just learning how to cook and mix the perfect blend of sushi rice.  While I have not spent years meditating over rice and practicing techniques, I have put together and easy quick recipe for sushi rice that I will use for all of my sushi roll recipes.

What is this Easy Sushi Rolls Thing?

There are a couple things people will tell you about me.  They will say I love bacon, beer and technology and sometimes they borderline on an unhealthy obsession.  What they may not know is my closeted love for the art of sushi.

Many people know sushi as that Japanese food with raw seafood and rice and seaweed and they don't want anything to do with it.  This is not a completely unfounded argument as there are a lot of varieties of sushi that contain raw salmon, tuna, crab, roe and even octopus that can intimidate the meat and potatoes crowd!  Another common American perception of sushi is that it is expensive and comes in small portions.  Two things Americans do not like.  Less adventurous Americans out there, listen up!  That's why you need me!

You will find simplified recipes in this blog that are a BOLD FUSION of American culture and Japanese tradition.  This blog will be useful to those who want to try their hand at the sushi art, but are intimidated by its ingredients and difficulty.  I teach the techniques and blend the tastes of America and Japan to show sushi is an easy, compact way to enjoy food.  If you are a purist of sushi and feel it should remain solely an untouched Japanese culinary art, then this blog may seem perverse.  BUT there is a wide group of people out there that are ready to blend American favorites like mac & cheese and pot roast with the wildly popular California roll.

There is no reason why a sushi roll needs to stay locked into a rice, seaweed, protein veggie pattern.  My recent search for a compact post workout meal has spurred me to dive head first into the art of making sushi.  In this blog I will post recipes containing simple directions, pictures and alternative ingredients.  As a subscriber to this blog, I encourage you to post comments to recipes with alternative ideas, opinions and anything else.

So let's get out there and make something that satisfies our hunger for new flavors.  Make something that meets all of our basic nutritional needs in one compact cylinder.  Make something beautiful.  Make something that promotes good health and inspires the creativity in all of us.