Veggie Sushi

Last night Rob and I had a date. We fed the girls their dinner, bathed them, and put them to bed before we set down to enjoy our "date" in the basement. It was fun, we've never put the girls to bed and had a date at home before, but we are definitely going to do it again (although, I wish I could get my kids to bed a bit earlier....I was absolutely starving by the time we actually ate). We sat on the floor, ate our sushi and vegged in front of the tv. On New Year's Day we started watching the first episode of the 3rd season of The Next Food Network Star. So happens it was a marathon that day, so we tivo'd them all, and we haven't been able to stop watching!!! We finally made it through the whole season last night!!

For our date we had veggie sushi and a brown rice miso soup. I got a sushi rolling set for Christmas so I've only rolled sushi twice (as you can see from the photo, I'm not real good at it yet). Despite the less than perfect maki rolls, it tastes delicious. Our sushi was filled with combinations of cucumber, avocado, carrot, and zucchini. Unfortunately, sushi rice is very fussy, and it's quite a process to prepare it for rolling sushi. If the rice were a bit less involved we'd probably be eating sushi every day.

To go along with the sushi I threw together a brown rice miso soup with soba noodles. Friday's are my last day before grocery shopping, so the cupboards and fridge are pretty bare. I just threw in a few things that I had sitting around, and it turned out delicious. For the soup I sauteed half a yellow onion, and one sliced carrot in about 1 Tbs of EVOO. When the onion was translucent and the carrot was soft I added in 4 cups of vegetable stock and 1 cup of water. I let that simmer while the sushi rice was cooking. When I was ready to roll the maki I added 2 Tbs of mild brown rice miso to the soup and dissolved it, then I added in some soba noodles. Just before the soup was ready to serve I added in a handful of frozen spinach leaves and simmered until they wilted.

Oishii!!!