Healthy Recipes: Vegan Sushi Night!

As we head into Week 2 of our fast, I decided to create a menu of international dishes for the next 7 days. We started tonight by rolling our own sushi! It was delicious and so fun to make! I also made a cucumber salad and some pan fried tofu since I had some tofu left over from last night.

I prepped all the veggies and the rice earlier this afternoon. I steamed some asparagus and baby bellas for one of the rolls, made 1 cup of brown rice, and made the cucumber salad. I also sliced up some fresh ginger, made wasabi, and chopped some fresh parsley for garnish.

Cucumber Salad
This is such an easy and refreshing little salad. It's just sliced cucumbers and rice wine vinegar. However, I made a lemon-ginger dipping sauce for the sushi that I ended up dipping my cucumbers in, so next time I will be using that for the salad! It was delightful!

Lemon-Ginger Sauce
I found this recipe on the Vegan Eats blog and it just sounded incredible:
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tablespoon organic cane sugar
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
½ heaping teaspoon fresh ginger, peeled and finely minced

I used just a little bit of honey instead of sugar. It's a nice complement for veggie futomaki. But as I said, next time I plan to use this as the dressing for our cucumber salad!

Futomaki
We made 3 different futomaki. If you have never rolled sushi before, you can find a ton of video tutorials online. Here's one site to check out: http://www.marisabaggett.com/2008/05/29/brown-sushi-rice-a-wholesome-alternative/

Roll #1: Cucumber, avocado, and carrot
Roll #2: Zucchini, avocado, and carrot
Roll #3: Asparagus, baby bella mushrooms, carrot and avocado (the asparagus and mushrooms were steamed earlier and then chilled in the refrigerator)

Roll #3 was our favorite by far. It was just so good! The texture of the mushrooms is similar to fish, and the carrot gave it a little crunch and the flavor of the asparagus just made everything right. A little avocado to give it a smooth finish and it was everything you could want in a roll. The other rolls were light and refreshing, and we couldn't finish everything. Fortunately, since there's no fish in the rolls we saved them and will hopefully be able to have the rest for lunch tomorrow! It's in a vacuum-sealed container, so hopefully it will keep.

This is definitely going to be on our regular rotation of meals! I wouldn't be surprised if we end up making it once a week, or at least every other week!