Enjoy sushi at home with sushi cups!

When I was pregnant, I could not stop eating sushi. I got looks from people at restaurants, but my doctor assured me that the chances of listeria are higher with unwashed produce. But now I know why I couldn't put the chopsticks down. It was my son - he was demanding the sushi. 

He's been obsessed with sushi since he was a toddler. Once, when he was three, he wept because the restaurant we were at ran out of yellowtail. They offered him a California roll, presumably because of his age, but his response was a dry, "That's not sushi."

You may think I'm bragging that my son is an adventurous eater. And while I am glad he has a zest for food, this isn't a brag so much as a complaint. You see, sushi is expensive, and he wants it all the time. It adds up.  And don't even get me started on inflation. 

If you read this blog, you'll know I'm a sucker for a TikTok recipe. Those flashy videos with glistening cheese pulls and a beat that slaps just does something to me. It's democratized the cooking world. Most of those people won't win a James Beard award, much less know who that is. 

I took a crack at sushi cups, in an attempt to thwart $200 sushi restaurant bills. And they're actually quite delicious! There are a few iterations of this recipe floating around, but this tried and true recipe works every time.

Sushi cup recipe

Ingredients

• 3 cups of cooked short-grain rice
• Sushi nori sheets, ripped into quarters (if not perforated, fold and pull)
• 3 filets of raw salmon or tuna, skin removed & cubed
• A few scallions
• Soy sauce
• Sesame oil
• White pepper
• Sriracha
• Duke’s (!) mayonnaise
• one avocado
• sesame seeds

Instructions

• Prepare the rice however you prefer. I use a rice cooker. Be sure to get that nice, sticky short-grain rice.
• Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees.
• While the rice is cooking, cube up your skinless salmon or tuna into 1/2 inch cubes.
• Toss the cubed fish into a bowl with a few splashes of sesame oil and generous dashes of soy sauce
• Chop scallions and toss them into the bowl with the fish
• Do a few shakes of white pepper
• Toss the mix and let it marinate
• Take three or four heaping spoonfuls of Duke's mayonnaise and drop it into a bowl.
• In the same bowl, squeeze in sriracha to taste. Blend until it becomes a smooth orange color, and taste test it to ensure it's just the right amount of spicy for you.
• Spoon this mix into a plastic food storage bag, and cut a tiny corner off the end of the bag, to squeeze thin piping. It's much more sustainable to use an icing dispenser used for baking - less single-use plastic.
• Tear the seaweed sheets into quarters
• One by one, take a sheet of seaweed into your hand, drop on a heaping spoonful of rice into the middle of it, and lay the seaweed into the muffin tin hole, keeping the rice in the middle and letting the edges of the seaweed stretch up the sides. Small muffin tins make the cups more fun and handheld, in my opinion.
• This can make up to two dozen pieces, depending on how much you fill up the muffin tins.
• Once each muffin tin is filled, top the rice with the cubed fish.
• Pop the muffin trays into the oven for 20 minutes.
• Remove from oven. Top each piece with a sliver of avocado, a drizzle of spicy mayo and a few shakes of sesame seeds.
• Take a large spoon and gingerly scoop these sushi cups out of the tins.
• Plate and serve!

 It may not be raw but it's full of flavor, much like a volcano roll. It makes for a really fun meal!