Maki! Onigiri! Temaki!

So....I have told you in my very first post that my parents owned a Japanese restaurant! Well, here are just a few things I made just to show off  ^_^  ...these were made in the kitchen of my appartment...I didn't have the super awesome equipment you usually find in a restuarant....but they still turned out alright more or less...

California roll and handroll

 This has kani (imitation crab meat), cucumbers, oshinko (pickled radish) and masago (caviar) and japanese mayonaise in it. But normally oshinko is not found in a California roll in the restaurants here....oh, and you can't find a California roll in Japan, it was created by someone and then it became popular with everyone in North America....

California roll with and without masago and kappa maki

 There are many different versions of the california roll. I've made 3 of the versions I've seen so far: one without caviar, one with caviar sitting on the top of the roll and one with caviar that surrounds the roll (see above). The roll with the seaweed on the outside is a kappa maki (cucumber roll). To be honest, there really isn't much of a difference with seaweed on the outside or on the inside. It's just that if you wrap a maki with seaweed on the inside, you hold more food content versus a roll with seaweed on the outside. As you can see, the rice takes up the majority of the volume within the roll and only leaves a little bit of space for the cucumbers when the seaweed is wrapped on the outside. BUT the rolls with seaweed on the outside are much harder to roll since they have a tendency to "explode" if you put too much rice/food in it!  

assorted onigiri

 Onigiri is usually rolled in the shape of a rounded triangle with the palm of your hands.

onigiri, tuna handroll, and assorted maki

  One thing I noticed a lot when we still had our restaurant was the customer's confusion over the names. Sushi is the fish on rice ball, maki is a roll (usually gets cut into 6 pieces) and temaki is a handroll (the cone shaped one) and sashimi is just the fish slices (without the rice). Onigiri is a ball of rice and you can basically put anything you want in it or sprinkled on it. Oh and that green blob is wasabi (horseradish), I didn't have pickled ginger (gari) but it's usually the flaked pink pieces you get along with the wasabi *sigh* if only I had a deep fryer, I would make shrimp tempura =w= and then with the shrimp tempura I would make a dragon roll with it....