I recently lost a bowling bet (just barely though), and at stake was a sushi dinner. However, when my friends came collecting, we didn’t head to one of my favorite local sushi restaurants - Sushi Wasabi located at 14460 Newport Ave, Tustin, CA 92780 – but rather, Whole Foods [where: 847 Park Ave, Tustin, CA]  to pick up the ingredients to make sushi at home.

Last night was my first time making sushi - it was a ton of fun and paired with a couple Kirins, it’s a great little evening activity for a few friends.

We picked up our ingredients to make maki (rolled sushi) and nigirizushi (pieces)
at the Whole Foods, located at 2847 Park Ave in Tustin, CA. Their seafood counter had a beautiful selection of fresh, sushi-grade toro, hamachi, salmon and unagi. We purchased a ¼ pound of each the toro, hamachi and salmon and ½ pound of the unagi.

For additional fillings, we purchased mango, strawberries, cucumbers and avocado.

In the Asian food aisle, we found Nori, seaweed wrappers, for our rolls. For some reason we only purchased one package of Nori and that was a minor mistake. I already had soy sauce and sugar at home, but purchased, Mirin (sweet rice wine) to make the delicious kabayaki sauce for the unagi.

Sushi rice is made with white, short-grained rice mixed with a dressing made of rice vinegar, sugar, salt and is cooled to room temperature before use. The rice is such an important element that we decided we would purchase it at the Whole Foods sushi counter, rather than risk making it and ruining it on our own. We purchased a few quarts and some advice for anyone making sushi for the first time, get more rice than you think you will need – we ended up running out.

We also purchased fresh ginger and already prepared wasabi from the sushi counter.

The only thing we forgot was roe (fish eggs).

All said and done, the damage was $80.00 and four people were fully fed.

Check out Wikipedia’s Sushi Wiki Cookbook for directions on how to roll sushi and make the kabayaki sauce.