Sushi feast!

A couple of weekends ago, Pete and I threw a little birthday party for Amy. I’m not sure you can call it it a party if the guest list amounts to four people, but those are the best kinds of parties. Because it means you can stuff your face with sushi and that there’s plenty of room to have a little boogie (that’s British speak for dance.)

Some Japanese friends of ours told us about this amazing Japanese grocery store, Atari-ya, in West London. It’s about the size of my bathroom, but is filled with amazingly delicious fresh fish at a fraction of the price of most other fish shops in London (I think.)

And since it’s impossible for me to not cook for a small country (it’s the Jewish mother in me), we had plenty of fish.

I made some classics, like yellow tail + scallion, salmon + avocado, and tuna + cucumber, but also some shrimp tempura rolls, spicy rolls with sriracha sauce and kewpie mayo, and a personal favorite of mine…bagel rolls (smoked salmon, cream cheese, and scallions)! It was all very simple. To make the sushi rice, I just bought a packet of sushi-rice powder and mixed it in after the rice was cooked. Dice and Akina, our Japanese friends, did it too, so it’s allowed.

This was the reject plate, made after I had gotten lazy…but I’d say all-in-all it was a decent effort for a first-time sushi maker.

Cocktails (rum, mint, ginger ale, and lime) turned out lovely too, lovelier seeing as you can apparently distribute an entire liter or rum between four of our ridiculously sized wine (?) glasses.

And just as proof that I should stick to other people’s cuisines, the only failure of the night was the above Delia Smith chocolate truffle torte. The failure being that I had had too much to drink when the time came to dust it with cocoa powder and spilled half the container on it. This is evident by the fact that the raspberries that I sloppily threw on afterwards are buried deep in cocoa power. And by the coughing.

Good “party” though, as any party is when  Montgomery Gentry’s involved (Thanks, Scotty McCreery.)