Temaki and Miso Soup

Tonight, we were pampered with a most delicious dinner of temaki and miso soup. We've been having too much fun since Nick and Sachiyo arrived two days ago with our new little grand baby, Hana, and we've been enjoying every minute including a wonderful dinner tonight.

The first night they were here we had beef stroganoff and last night we had roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy.

If you're wondering why the gravy is so light colored, it's because the roast beef didn't have much juice so I made the gravy using some of the turkey stock I made on Saturday. Nick just needed his red meat fix and mashed potatoes and gravy fix. He also wanted a pecan pie for dessert since he missed Thanksgiving so I made a bourbon pecan pie

and he had it with both ice cream and whipped cream.

Tonight, he was ready to go back to his Japanese diet so he and Sachiyo made a very common Japanese meal to share with us called temaki and Nick's favorite, miso soup.

The miso soup was pork miso soup with tofu, fried tofu, green onions and enoki mushrooms and it was delicious. Temaki is like sashimi wrapped in nori, or edible seaweed, to make a cone-like serving of fresh fish, vegetables of your choice, and sushi rice.

Nick and Sachiyo went shopping at Uwajimaya today

(and a quick stop to Starbucks)

and they were able to pick up all their ingredients for the dinner. Below are all the choices we had to make our temaki: (clockwise from the top): lettuce, shiso (a type of leafy plant like cilantro), sprouts, Japanese cucumber, pickled daikon radish, yellow fin tuna, salmon, shrimp, chopped blue fin tuna, wasabi, ginger and in the middle was canned tuna with Japanese mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Japanese mayonnaise is different than our's in the U.S. It has more seasonings, almost like a dip.

These are all very common ingredients in temaki. All the ingredients are placed in the center of the table and Nick demonstrated to us how to prepare one.

You place some rice on one end of the nori along with any combination of fish and vegetable that you want.

Then you roll the nori so it forms a cone shape with the ingredients inside.

We each had some soy sauce at our place setting for dipping and also you could put a little wasabi in before you rolled it.

It is very tasty with all the varieties of fish and vegetables and the nori adds a nice crunch to it.

We each had about four or five and then the nori was gone so then you could just eat the fish with rice like sashimi. We also had a Japanese dessert called wagashi, or Japanese sweets.

These are made with mochi (a glutinous rice paste) on the outside and sweet bean paste on the inside.

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Nick and Sachiyo love these little desserts and we had them when we were in Japan. They also have the popular mocha ice cream at Trader Joe's. To make this day even more special, we had an incredible rainbow today that shined above the whole city.

It lasted about 20 minutes and then it was gone but we got as many photos with it that we could while it lasted. I've never seen such a spectacular rainbow.

It was such a special moment to experience this magnificent natural wonder. I call it "Hana's Rainbow" because to have her here with us is equally as wonderful. The heavens are looking down on us.

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