Sushi Easter Eggs and other Sushi Rice Treats

I've been playing around with sushi rice for the past little while now, making fun-to-eat creations. Sushi rice is simply rice that has been seasoned with rice wine vinegar, sugar, salt and assorted flavourings. Ideally, short grain rice should be used for making sushi rice. But, if you have a lot of regular long grain rice lying about, that will work just as well.

During this Easter long weekend, I happened to have the opportunity to have some fun with sushi rice creations. On Saturday, we celebrated my mother-in-law's birthday with a huge dinner of prime rib roast and ham. After this feast, we had a lot of rice leftover. I was thinking that we could always eat up the rice the next day with all the leftover meats, but why not make Easter sushi eggs instead to bring to my mom?

So on Sunday morning, we gathered all the ingredients we needed and proceeded to make a whole batch of sushi Easter eggs. It was a lot of fun and it tasted really good too. I think this may become an Easter tradition for us. Hmmmm.... what other holiday sushi rice creation can we work on next? Victoria Day sushi????? Gee, that gonna be a tough one.

I also posted some pictures of earlier attempts at making sushi rice treats.

I bought this book a long long time ago and now I'm finally using it. It presents many ways to have fun with sushi rice.

Here's the brand of short grain rice we use for making sushi rice. "Botan" and "Calrose" are other popular brands. Purists will use only short grain rice for sushi rice making because it is a stickier rice. But I've had no problems using regular long grain rice because I tend to use more water when cooking rice and the addition of rice wine vinegar will also add moisture, thus making it sticky enough for forming shapes.

Short grain rice vs long grain rice.

I use brown rice vinegar for flavouring as well as for making the rice stick together better for forming shapes. White rice vinegar can be used as well.

To flavour and colour the sushi rice, we used these flavouring packets. Salmon (pink), egg (yellow) and plum (purple).

To make orange coloured sushi rice, we used masago (flying fish eggs). These are really fun to eat because you can pop each of the little flying fish eggs in your mouth. Pop, pop, pop!!!

Here are 2 sample ones we made. To minimize overhandling of the sushi rice, we use clear plastic food wrap (Saran Wrap) to shape the eggs.

Dick wanted to put faces on them. They look like mummies. More suitable for halloween than for Easter, don't you think?

Here's the batch of Easter eggs we made from the leftover rice.

Dick used some seaweed strips to put funny faces on some of the eggs.

To make it more interesting, we hid some goodies inside the eggs. The eggs were filled with an assortment of cucumber, crabmeat and ham.

My mom is looking a little bit leery, wondering what kind of food I'm foisting on her.

I think she had a good time with us. I'm laughing so hard because Dick is pretending to be a bunny when trying to show my mom that one of the Easter eggs is a "bunny" egg. Then afterwards, he tried to indicate an egg by trying to lay one from his behind. So funny.....

Here are some other sushi rice creations I made previously.

The yin-yang symbol was my own idea. The white portion is just white unflavoured sushi rice. The black portion was made of sushi rice mixed with black toasted seseame seeds and the dots were made with steamed green beans. Seaweed sheets were used for separating the black and white rice portions.

The flower maki rolls were my first attempts at making fancy maki rolls following one of the book's ideas.

Here's the book's version of the flower blossom maki rolls.

These are kitty cat rice balls from the Hana Sushi book.

Our version of the kitty cat rice balls. They look cute but tasted too ricey. It was like eating a small bowl of rice with a few tiny pieces of meat.

So we made our own bunny and turtle rice balls filled with canned sardines to make for a heartier snack.

I used raw soba noodles for the whiskers. They are a bit crunchy, but edible. It's like eating raw "Mr Noodles". I used seaweed sheets to cut out the facial features.

These are tiny rice balls covered with a layer of seaweed and strips of seaweed. The eyes are made from circle cutouts of mozarella cheese and black sesame seeds. These are the cute dust balls from the "Totoro" movie. The idea came from this Annathered's blog post.