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Just Roll with It By Ali Rouse Royster, 3 rd Generation Picture it: Summer 2020. You all know what was going on back then. My children, who were then three, four and five years old, had been home since mid-March. My boys were sporting unfortunate home haircuts. We’ve watched all of the streaming. We have cooked 10,000 homemade meals. So when my five-year old adventurous eater asks, “Mom, can we have sushi for dinner?” (to him that means a very tame California roll, which I know is not technically sushi), I say: “Absolutely.” We are game for anything to mix up our dinner routine at this point! And then I say: “We’ve got nothing but time; why don’t we try making sushi?! What could go wrong?” (Cut to a montage of all our upcoming mishaps in the kitchen.) We googled. Realizing we needed just one special tool, a sushi rolling mat, we ordered. We found all our ingredients at our local Rouses. We made our own rice. We mixed our own crab-with-a-k. And then the fun part: Let’s put it on seaweed paper and roll it all up and enjoy! We sharpened our best knife, and wet it before using. (I have since invested in new knives.) Well, wouldn’t you know. There’s an art to rolling and cutting sushi that I decidedly did not pick up from the two YouTube videos I watched as my “training.” I have always appreciated the culinary expertise of chefs, but have a newfound deep appreciation for the finger-muscle strength and knife skills of our sushi chefs at all our favorite local sushi joints, including the fine folks at the sushi counters at Rouses. So when my oldest asks me, now that he’s nine, “Mom, how about sushi?” — the answer may still be “Absolutely,” and it will be fresh-made and hand-rolled that same day, but we are going to know our role and make a little Rouses run for that California roll.

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