Sushi & storms

February is well into its stride, and despite relatively mild temperatures, the storms just keep coming. We’ve got gale warnings again for next week, and most evenings the caravan is rocking away like a bucking bronco here on the side of our windswept croft.

We’ve learned never to overfill mugs of tea and to hold onto things as we move from room to room. Craziness!

So what’s a girl to do whilst the weather is stopping her getting out on the croft? She makes sushi. Of course she does.

I haven’t made sushi at home for many years. We used to eat it a lot in London where Japanese food outlets were good and readily available.

Not feeling confident that I could get sushi grade fresh fish I decided to err on the side of caution and use cooked or smoked fish instead of raw. In this case tuna mayo, smoked salmon, cooked prawns and smoked mackerel, all from my normal supermarket shop. I managed to get wasabi, nori and even cooked crispy onions for coating some of the rolls.

The biggest challenge in the tiny caravan kitchen was making room to assemble the rolls. It took a bit of shuffling and manoeuvring, and was a much fiddlier process than in a spacious kitchen with lots of worktop space.

I won’t go into detail here, but let’s just say that any flat surface was fair game (toaster, I thank you) and that it was inelegant in the extreme.

But amazingly they worked. And they tasted great.

Next time I may try making vegetarian sushi. I could imagine that using roasted butternut squash, avocado, cucumber, sweet potato and peppers would work just as well as these fish based fillings.

Never let fear of failure or lack of space stop you trying something new. You can usually always find a way.