East Coast Kahuna

Sushi and Sweet Bread

I grew up eating sushi in Hawaii. Usually, it was on special occasions, such as New Year's Day, and my Mom would make many rolls - she hand-rolled them using little bamboo mats. You had to get special ingredients. You had to use the better grade of seaweed (nori), the sushi type, not the musubi (riceball) type. My Mom usually used unagi (eel) instead of tuna (a common substitute). There was also the red-colored dried shimp powder (sometimes green also, but not often), kampyo (gourd, which comes in dried form and has to be rehydrated in boiling water), sometimes takuwan (picked daikon, a large radish, usully colored yellow). She always made the maki-zushi type (in rolls). The other popular type was the inari-zushi, which used pouches made from aburage (fried tofu).

Nowadays, you can get sushi in the regular supermarket, at least in Ithaca, and it's not so hard to get. You can even get King's brand sweet bread sometimes (which they call Hawaiian bread), although we always knew it as Portugeuse Sweet Bread (pronounced "Po-do-gi"). I miss the Buck's Bakery brand sweetHowever, it still doesn't taste quite the same as what my Mom made. Everytime I go back on a trip, I will eat sushi and sweet bread at the very least.

posted by tjh14850 @ 10:45 AM