Other sushi includes types of sushi that don’t quite fit in so well to the other categories. This includes inari-zushi and sumeshi, the sushi rice.

I love yellowtail. We all know that. You might also know that I love the mayonnaise mix that I used in the Maguro Karakuchi Spicy Tuna Roll. (I put it in tuna salad, and I’m seriously considering hard-boiling some eggs and putting it in egg salad!) So of course, I had to see what happened when I put both together! However, since I like to mix things up a little, I couldn’t do exactly the same roll, just with yellowtail instead of tuna! (Well, I could, but how interesting would that really be?) Lucky for me, I’ve got awesome-as-can-be readers. One of my awesome readers, Kevin, commented saying that he had made something similar to my Maguro Karakuchi Spicy Tuna, except he made it gunkan-style with the sauce on the top, instead of as a roll. Genius! Pure genius! Thus the natural thing for me to do is to steal… er… borrow his idea and make it with yellowtail!

It was delicious. I will be making it again. Kevin, you win the Awesome Sushi Day Reader Award!

A couple of months ago, I was offered a cookbook called Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking, by Harumi Kurihara, to review and try recipes from. Of course, I have been so swamped lately, I have barely had time to make sushi, let alone review a cookbook. Finally, I had some time to look through it and flag a few recipes I wanted to try. This coincided perfectly with Yvo’s Bento Contest, so I figured that Japanese Potato Salad would be a perfect addition to a bento box. The way it turned out for me, it was just so-so, but I have a feeling this recipe would have turned out considerably better if I had more kitchen experience (have I ever steamed/boiled potatoes? No. I just make sushi. You get my point…).

About a month ago, Yvo from Feisty Foodie announced “Does This Make My Lunch Look Phat?, a contest on her blog. She makes a bento for lunch every day, so her contest is to create a bento box and blog about it. I was super excited when I heard about this… I have loved looking at all her different daily bento boxes, and have wanted to make my own for quite some time now. So of course I jumped at the excuse to make my own bento!

Every year the weekend of Thanksgiving, my Japanese great aunts throw a huge Christmas party. The entire family is invited, so it’s a huge day of craziness, fun, and tons of really good Japanese food. I have fond memories of eating sushi and somen salad (somen is a type of Japanese noodle) and watching while all the adults played white elephant. Unfortunately, once I started performing Nutcracker every year the party conflicted with the performances, so I haven’t gone since I was pretty young.

Happy Independence Day! I hope everyone is having a fun Fourth of July celebration! Well, my American readers anyways. Sorry everyone else. Now don’t get mad at me, because I know this isn’t really sushi, or even that close, but I’m going to post it anyways! Because I can.

On Father’s Day, after I was finished making the sushi, my mom made tapas. My sister always requests them, because she went to Spain over spring break on a trip with some of her teachers and classmates from her high school.

Spam musubi isn’t exactly sushi, although it is very similar. It is a popular Hawaiian snack using spam, regular rice (not sumeshi), and nori. I find it to be really yummy and not too hard to make. The marinated/fried spam tastes almost like unagi, in an odd roundabout way, but trust me, it’s good! (Hehe that’s to all of you who turn your noses up at the idea of spam (the food) - it’s actually pretty good! Try it scrambled in eggs too )

What do you get when you cross a fried pig with a nutty monkey? I have no idea, but it tastes surprisingly good!

So now that you know how to make oshizushi, it’s time to make some! You can use most ingredients in oshizushi, although squishier ingredients work better since they can compress very nicely. Here are some of the creations we tried…