Simply sushi Sushi is a marriage of healthy ingredients, gourmet cooking

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Having had a meat-and-potatoes upbringing where lasagna was considered exotic, I feel pretty darn cosmopolitan about the fact that I even eat sushi.

Creating the delicate little bites of seafood, paper-thin vegetables, rice and ingredients that you can’t even buy north of Bangor was unquestionably a job for the professional chefs with the big knives.

So, Bill Morrison, owner and chef at the Seaweed Cafe in the Southwest Harbor village of Manset, brought the intimidating Japanese cuisine into my kitchen with a single lesson: making sushi is the art of playing with your food.

“It’s like a Tinkertoy set,” Morrison said. “It’s all about designing and constructing.”

Six sushi enthusiasts turned out for Morrison’s first cooking class at the cafe earlier this month, where we learned the hands-on basics of building the small rice cakes.

The key to good sushi is well-prepared rice, Morrison stressed.

“Most people around here think sushi is raw fish – sushi is rice,” he explained.

Sushi rice, short-grained and sticky, is boiled for 10-20 minutes, then tossed with sweet mirin, tart rice vinegar and salt to taste as it cools to form the basis for all types of sushi.

“I personally don’t do measurements,” Morrison said as he stirred. “I just rely on my tongue to tell me when everything is right.”

Once the seasoned rice reaches room temperature, it can be molded into egg-shaped balls to be topped with fish for nigiri sushi, or rolled with vegetables and fish into maki sushi rolls. The final outcome is limited only by your imagination.

“What you can do with sushi – the shapes, the sizes, the colors – it’s innumerable,” Morrison said.

Three years ago, Morrison moved to Manset and founded the Seaweed Cafe in an attempt to marry healthy ingredients to the flavors of gourmet cooking.

“It’s about making food not just for the tongue, but for the whole body,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be burlap and ashes. You don’t have to be a monk to eat healthily.”

Japanese cooking, with its emphasis on fish and vegetables, is a perfect match for the fresh seafood and organic produce that Morrison buys locally.

“If you want to do gourmet food, it just speaks to quality right way to go organic,” he said. “Most of the seafood comes from right out of the water here.”

So Seaweed Cafe offers Asian cuisine, with a spicy twist. The menu includes such innovations as mussels simmered in saki with Thai spices, salmon poached with basil and curry, and sushi made with lobster, cilantro and wasabi-bernaise sauce.

With its soothing wasabi-green walls and creative dishes, the cafe is as eclectic as Morrison’s background.

He stumbled into cooking as a college student who applied to wait tables at a fancy restaurant, but wound up working in the kitchen. He honed his skills through years of apprenticeship at Boston-area restaurants, and learned to prepare sushi from a Hindu monk who cooked in full samurai regalia at an ashram in New York for more than 4,000 worshippers.

To introduce Mainers to the world of sushi, Morrison offers maki rolls of smoked trout or tuna, combined with avocado and cucumber for those who aren’t altogether comfortable with the thought of raw fish.

“People are really kind of freaked out about it at first,” he said.

For our first attempts, Morrison presented a tray of English cucumbers and carrots sliced lengthwise, asparagus spears blanched to a brilliant green, slivers of red pepper and spicy, pickled ginger.

“Cutting, in a sense, is almost like cooking for the Japanese. You’re creating a texture,” he said. “The thinner the cut, the more flavor comes out of the vegetable.”

To build the maki rolls, we placed nori, the sheets of paper-thin seaweed, rough-side-up on small straw mats. We slathered lumps of rice on the crackly nori and with damp hands, smooshed them down into a sticky white slab that looked more like Play-Doh than food.

The rice should blanket 2/3 of a sheet of nori about a half-inch thick, Morrison said.

We each painted a thin smear of wasabi down the center of our rice, then decorated it with a narrow stack of vegetables.

Finally, we used the mat to slowly nudge the rice into a long, smooth cylinder with the vegetables at its center. This step is much easier than it sounds – just use your thumbs to hold the roll together as you nudge it forward with your fingertips. The rice is so sticky that it wants to cling to itself.

“You want to use your hand to make it firm and round, but don’t press the guts out of it,” Morrison said. “You’re just trying to create a shape.”

Round is the preferred form for a sushi roll. Morrison was skilled enough to demonstrate molding his roll into a square. My cucumber-ginger roll was askew and triangular.

But, no matter, once our vegetable rolls were sliced and arranged on trays with Morrison’s seafood delicacies, the meal was irresistible.

“I’m in sushi heaven,” said Bar Harbor resident Kathy Nyborg said.

Morrison will hold cooking classes Wednesdays at 6 p.m. throughout early spring. The March 28 session will cover broths, sauces and the use of miso. April 11 will address vegetable-cutting techniques for stir-fry and salads. Subsequent topics will be announced. Seaweed Caf? is open 6- 9 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. For dinner reservations, or for information about cooking classes, call the cafe at 244-0572.

Sushi Rice

2 cups rice

21/2 cups spring water

2 tablespoons mirin

3 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 teaspoon salt or season to taste

Bring water and rice to a boil, reduce for 15-20 minutes. Take off stove and let stand for 10 minutes. Pour rice into a big bowl. With a rice paddle (or large spoon) lift and fold the rice while slowly adding the mirin, rice vinegar and salt. Let the rice cool while periodically lifting and folding. Within an hour, the rice mixture should be at room temperature.

Baked Goat Cheese Salad with Miso Dressing

1/3 cup miso paste

1 cup canola oil

1/8 cup tarragon vinegar

1/8 cup rice vinegar

1/4 cup mirin

2 teaspoons chopped garlic

2 tablespoons chopped onion

1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon

1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro

1 tablespoon black pepper

1/3 cup water

1 tablespoon tamari (Japanese soy sauce)

1 small, firm round of herbed goat cheese

Mix all ingredients but cheese and toss with fresh mesclun greens. Roast cheese in a 400 F oven for about 8-10 minutes, place on salad.

Pan Seared Maple Salmon with Wilted Spinach

8 ounces salmon fillet

1 bag baby spinach leaves

1/4 cup canola oil

1/4 cup roasted sesame oil

1/4 cup tamari

1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar

3 tablespoons mirin

2 tablespoons pure maple syrup

1 teaspoon chopped ginger root

1 teaspoon chopped garlic

Mix liquid ingredients. Marinate salmon up to overnight. For a spicier marinade, add ginger root and garlic. Drizzle sesame oil and heat to high in a wok or saute pan. Sear fish on both sides until marinade forms a caramelized crust. Place fish in 400 F oven 8-10 minutes to finish cooking. Rinse spinach. Place wet leaves in a hot wok, cover. Cook for about 5 minutes, then rinse in cold water. Toss spinach with sesame seeds, mirin, sesame oil and rice vinegar to taste. Top spinach with salmon.

Japanese terms

Sushi: rice

maki sushi: seaweed-rice rolls encasing fish or vegetables

nigiri sushi: small ovals of rice topped with raw fish

sashimi: slices of raw fish

nori: paper-thin seaweed sheets

wasabi: hot horseradish-mustard condiment

mirin: sweet rice wine, a byproduct of saki

miso: vegetable bouillon with a fermented soybean base