Pseu-shi – Weekday California Bōll

The California Roll makes me mad. Every time I go to a Japanese restaurant or sushi bar, I crinkle my nose when I see California rolls on the menu. If someone actually orders it, I just have to *sigh* I don’t know the history of how the California roll came into existence, but I’d be willing to bet my own bamboo mat that it wasn’t a sushi chef in Japan that created the original pseu-shi that is the ancestor to things like…Philadelphia and Las Vegas rolls. *sigh*…

But even with my mild aversion to the idea of a California roll, I have to admit that I love all the components (except rice): crabmeat, avocadoes, cucumbers. So every once in a while, I allow the California roll to serve as the inspiration for a super easy throw-together meal for a hectic weekday that would make Rachael Ray nervous about her job – a California roll in a bowl, properly referred to as the California B?ll here at the Delicious Life. ;)

Steamed white rice is the base. Two cups of hot cooked white rice get tossed with a tablespoon each of rice wine vinegar and soy sauce (more if you’re a saltaholic like me), and a teaspoon each of sugar, sesame oil, and toasted sesame seeds. Certainly, fresh hot rice tastes the best, but re-heated leftover rice works well since it will have things added to it. Pile the rice into a bowl, and then add the ingredients that make a California roll: chopped avocado, julienned cucumber, chopped crab meat, and garnished with julienned toasted nori. Yes this is a weekday meal and I had to use “krab” meat, okay? *sheesh* What am I? A sushi chef or something?

Variations of the B?ll make it onto the Delicious table fairly often for weekday meals. When I am good, and can plan in advance, I make the big Sunday dinner something that includes a large pot of rice, with the intention of having leftover rice all week. Sometimes the rice becomes fried rice, sometimes it’s stirred into soup to make it a meal, and often, leftover rice is made into B?lls. The same ingredients as the California Boll can take a substitution of broiled unagi instead of crabmeat and drizzled with the sweet unagi kabayaki sauce, or the rice base can be served with fresh maguro (tuna), chopped scallions, and a drizzle of spicy sriracha and sesame oil.

With almost no real effort and quite a few variations, the California B?ll was the perfect entry into Uncle Wiggly’s Good Time Cooking Contest, version Weekday over at Meathenge. Unfortunately, it is long past the deadline for entering the competition. In fact, it is so long past that Dr. Biggles has already selected a winner. But I was so inspired by the contest that I still wanted to post what I made for it. Thanks to Dr. Biggles, for giving me the inspiration and incentive to put a b?ll together, even if it is five days late.

(And of course, another round of *kiss kiss* congratulations to the overall winner of the contest, Saffron’s BLT from The Food Palate!)

How to Make a California Roll Bowl

Cook Asian short- or medium-grain rice in your trusty little Zojirushi rice cooker.

For every 2 cups of cooked rice, gently stir/mix in:

1 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp toasted sesame seeds

Pile the rice into a bowl and top with:

chopped avocado
julienned cucumber
shredded krab (do not dare use real crab! no one wastes real crab in a California roll)
julienned toasted nori

If you’re FANCY, garnish with masago or tobiko (the crunchy orange flying fish roe). I also like to throw a little ball of wasabi in there for fun. Because I’m fun like that.

Sarah J. Gim · August 1, 2005 · 31 comments

Tagged as: asian cooking, cooking for one, japanese cooking, rice, sushi

{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }

1 LACheesemonger August 2005 at 8:12 am

Ah come on now Sarah, now you’re really insulting me.

Let’s take a look at the very 1st post I made to your blog about Typhoon… shall we?….dance.
“ESSAY 5″ …(origin of California Roll)
http://www.thesushibar.com/ssushi_chipcolumn.shtml

Ah yes, that post that the CHLA team deleted, one ‘controversial’ paragraph went about like this on a 1k post rant about the excessive use/misuse of ‘authentic’ on CHLA’s board by ignorant ‘experts’ who don’t know what they are talking about:

“I was in Little Tokyo waiting for the former Fujiyoshi restaurant to open when I walked into the clothing store next door. A young college aged, Japanese temp saleswoman who did not speak English all that well, was asked by yours truly, if she had been next-door to try the sushi. She said no and that she also worked part-time at a Japanese restaurant near the Beverly Center, but that she likes sushi… ” I like California Roll and spicy tuna roll”. Seriously, arrgh, the youth of Japan has been corrupted by Americanized/Western cultural fastfood mentality! You can get either of these now ‘traditional’ (as long as you were born in Japan in the last few decades) sushi items at many a sushi bar in Japan. Blasphemy for us ‘old-farts’ ” CHLA hits the delete button, hehe.

Sushi 101, and for those who missed it Typhoon’s top dog chef uses Westernized two-edged knives to cut his sushi, not the traditional (and potentially sharper edge, from craftsmen that go back the knife making and samurai swords) single-edged specialty Japanese knives.

I suppose I could give you a few more links about Japanese knives, various types of steel used for the ultra expensive custom models that are priced at over $1k.

Hmm, now did DS see the Jonathan Gold article (and has the hot to trot Sarah been to Koi yet to… um, hookup ;-) ?) about how Shige (Shibucho on Beverly, which is NOT a dump) only serves what ‘da princess’ would consider traditional sushi?

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/32/restguide-sushi.php

See, that’s why you cannot even believe the so-called experts. Now assuming, I could get Sonya Choi to put up with the hyperactive DS (well since they both like to cook Korean food at home, umm well of course Sonya does have a French chef b/f… which would make DS kind of jealous, lol); I was thinking DS could join us sometime when we head on back to a rare appearance at Shibucho for the usual suspects of loads of wine, food- challenged, Shige prepared meals to work with the wines, and NO karaoke. I mean you can only make sushi for how many decades before you get kind of bored with it. Throw in a gang of wine weenies/ corkheads; hellbent on challenging the chef to come up with mostly Japanese influenced, but fusion with Mediterranean/Italian cooking, et viola Japanese pizza, cause we joked with him (not a good idea, given his sometimes whimsical moods) about how the rich but acidic 1992 Alsatian Riesling Sonya brought would go great with pizza… if only this were an Italian pizzeria.

So there you have it, thinly cut Japanese eggplant slices, with a medium-coarse tomato puree (Momataro?), and grated Italian parmesan sprinkled on top and then quickly melted down with the broiler. What you see in the decanter, next to my bottle of 1995 W-S Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir-sexy sweet with some types of sushi, is the 1992 Williams-Selyem Zinfandel-hehe only 15.6% alcohol, but given Sonya and that other lightweight from ‘Da Bronx, a person even more hyper that Sarah!, in the picture, were starting to burp 1/2 way through the meal of umm, 8 opened-but not all finished bottles (from the hillside portion of the Martinelli vineyard, which is where the oldest 90+yr vines are, nicknamed but never used on the labels before the younger generation of Martinelli’s took over from Grandpa Leno Martinelli…. ‘Jackass Hill’, cause it took a jackass/mule to pull carts up the super steep hill, where machinery could not go, to load up the picked grapes), it was an ‘Bacchanalian feast’ as it were,

Not sure DS could handle that, and no sex- kind of like the interviewer from GQ with Goddess Supreme Jessica Alba (whom I’ll tell you I’m quite jealous of, started becoming a sophisticated wine drinker in her teens, now that’s just not right… and I highly doubt she could tell you all these different nuances and different varietals as claimed in the article… but still, if JA wants to drink up a storm with me and some tasty food sometime, I’m available, lol!
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_847 )

Oh sure we had some maguro sashimi as a palette cleanser towards the end of the meal, but other than that, no real ‘traditional’ sushi. More fusion than anything else.

Then again, DS doesn’t even read the links I provide, so would it be worth it to have her along if she only pays attention to what she wants to pay attention to??? Hmm, her bio says ‘big brain’; but apparently big brain needs to be slapped up side the head on occasion ;). So I say to DS, “you’re bad”. Then she does the comeback line that Sandra Oh’s character from Sideways says, “I know, I need to be spanked”. Uh huh, me thinks DS is a bit on the silly side when she goes out, I could be wrong though… 1st, 2nd, 3rd impressions and so on ;)

No matter how steady your hands are, without a flash, it’s impossible to get sharp/blur-free pictures at slow shutter speeds. You need either a expensive, big SLR digicam; or a newer model Point-N-shoot that has a image sensor that goes up to at least ISO rating of 1600, like the Fuji F10.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v103/udaman/Sushi%20Shibucho/eggplant-pizza.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v103/udaman/Sushi%20Shibucho/dessert.jpg

M$ Word tallies, ~999 words, not quite up to DS’s usual 1k+ average…I guess I just don’t have her gift for gab :(

BTW-CHLA team, try & delete this from DS’s blog, she’ll get a full version via e-mail anyway, so there!

Pseu-shi – Weekday California Bōll

How to Make a California Roll Bowl

obsessions

Most Recent Posts

Current Buzz

The Delicious List of Lists

She's Just Not That Into You

The Delicious Lifestream