"Hands-On" Sushi Class @ Central Market Cooking School

The day after we returned from the International Quilt Festival in Houston Jamie and I signed up for a "hands-on" cooking class at the Central Market Cooking School here in San Antonio.  Once again, I have to say how fortunate I feel to be living in a city with both a CM Cooking School as well as a branch of the Culinary Institute.  To say that taking classes from these two fine schools would be a vast understatement!
That said, I have always been a bit daunted by sushi.  I tried it a number of years ago, but found that I felt very uncoordinated.  Perhaps it was the interim and having learned to make Vietnamese spring rolls (which IMHO are much more tricky) or the fact that we were using the bamboo roller with a sheet of saran wrap on it, but this class gave me a great deal of confidence in making sushi!

Chef Goro and his CM assistant prepare the sushi rice

Jamie anticipates sushi-making 

we are served a lovely cucumber salad while waiting to make our sushi rolls

All the ingredients were distributed to each participant at our tables,

which were sanitized prior to the class starting.

grab a handful of the sticky sushi rice and place it in the nori sheet

along with the crab and veggies

roll and "squeeze" the roll just slightly, cross cut, and yum!

here is a shrimp tempura roll (rice outside the nori on this one)

it sure doesn't seem like this would work....

but it did!

the contents of a spicy tuna hand roll

chef Goro demonstrates what the rice should look like for the hand roll

a spicy tuna hand-roll, which looks a bit like an ice cream cone!