TheBanyanTree: Sushi time again

[Theta Brentnall]

Ahh, my feet hurt.  It's the Methodists Do Asian Food Bazaar again and all 
day long I have been making pies (hey, I know Asians don't do pies, but 
Methodists do), boiling shredded carrots for the bara and helping one of 
the other guys cook kampyo, which is a kind of really, really long gourd 
that is used in maki sushi, and getting everything ready for the Bara sushi 
marathon tomorrow.   Bara sushi, as I may have told you before, is rice 
with a vinegar/sugar brine, cooked carrots, shredded egg, peas, and 
shiitake mushrooms.  To put all this together, early in the week I get 2 lb 
of dried shiitake (which was bought by the shopping committee along with 
many hundreds of pounds of other items), wash it, soak it overnight, then 
cook it allllll day long with soy, rice vinegar, sugar and dashinomoto, 
which is a dried fish bouillon.  Two gallons of this stuff, slow cooked and 
stirred until it all cooks off and makes a thick glaze.  I committed rank 
heresy by chopping up the mushrooms after soaking but before glazing, since 
that reduced the spread of stickiness by a large order of 
magnitude.  Ssssh, don't tell the tiny old Japanese ladies.

Then I cook two large tubs full of carrots that the dozen or so people on 
the vegetable committee have shredded.  The egg committee cooks up several 
dozen scrambled eggs and bags them 2 cups to the bag for my batches of 
bara.  The rice washers wash the rice and have it all measured up in big 
baskets.  The set-up committee carries all the supplies and equipment from 
the storage shed to the classroom where my committee works and sets up the 
tables just so to facilitate the cooking, cooling, mixing and packaging of 
the bara.  In the past couple of days, they have washed everything, made 
sure it all works, and counted all the bits and pieces to make sure I have 
everything I need.  So tomorrow morning at 6 I will start the first of the 
three 15-cup rice cookers to doing their job.  My own tiny old Japanese 
ladies will start arriving at 7, delivered by their tiny old Japanese 
husbands.  I might talk one or more of the guys into staying if I promise 
to let them do the stirring and cooling of the rice.  They think they can 
do that better than their wives.  I will have eight or ten people working 
off and on through the morning, carefully spooning the mixed rice into 
little plastic bowls, garnishing with parsley, fastening on the lids and 
packing them away in boxes for the transportation committee to pick up and 
deliver to the cafeteria of the school where we sell the food.  When we are 
done, the clean-up committee will come take everything down, wash, sweep 
and put everything back where it belongs for Sunday school the next morning.

We sell this stuff for 75 cents a bowl.

And I have just about the easiest, least people-intensive committee in the 
whole thing.  Nothing like, say, chow mein, which takes so many steps and 
people that if we sold it based on the manhours alone, a pint would cost 
$200.  But it sure is fun and oh, man, does it taste good!  Sometime when 
you are in the Sacramento area on the first weekend of March, you have to 
come try it out.

Theta