One of my favorite foods is sushi, and when someone in our family has a birthday, we often send out for a big plate to celebrate. While the classic sushi with raw fish on top (called nigiri-zushi or hand-gripped sushi) has become quite famous all over the world, I was surprised to find some variations of sushi that I hadn’t known about before coming here. Like chirashi-zushi, essentially a “tossed salad” of fish pieces over a bowl of vinagered rice, or inari-zushi, a little bag made of fried tofu with rice in it, which is sweetened with soy sauce and sugar. One of my favorite varieties is maki-zushi, or rolled sushi, and we eat this at my house quite often. It’s easy and fun to make: just take sheets of nori, spread rice that’s been flavored with the convenient powdered sushi flavoring called sushi-no-ko, then add good things like strips of scrambled egg, canned tuna fish and mayonnaise or cucumber, roll and eat. J-List has some interesting sushi related products from Japan for you, including the awesome Hello Kitty rolled sushi molds we posted today, plus — wow — Sushi Food Drops candies.
Sushi comes in many delicious forms.