Shrimp and avocado salad 海老とアボカドのサラダ

One of our favorite "salads" is tuna sashimi cubes and avocado but for a change I decided to substitute cooked shrimp for the tuna sashimi. We decided to dub this our version of shrimp cocktail.

For color I added Campari tomato (skined) on the bed of babay arugula.

This could have been an easy dish to make since we had a bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer, but complications arose. The frozen raw shrimp we had was a bit old. I prepared it but it had some off taste (iodine flavor common in cheap take out shrimp dishes). While I may have thought the taste wasn't that bad and considered using the shrimp they did not pass my wife's taste test so "that was that". I had to get some new shrimp for this dish. In our grocery store, I found shell-on but deveined red shrimp from Argentina (#1, below). This is the same kind of shrimp we used to have as sashimi at Tako grill.

Ingredients (4 appetizer servings):
6 large shrimp (frozen) shell on (#2), thawed by running water.
Avocado, half, skinned, stone removed and cubed
lemon juice from half a lemon

For dressing
Wasabi (as much as you like, mayo tames the spiciness down) and light colored soys sauce (1tbs) (#6)
1 tbs mayonnaise
Fresh dill, chopped (optional)

Directions:
Boil salted water with a splash of sake added. Turn off the flame and add thawed shrimp with shells on, place lid on and let them steep for 15 minutes.
Drain and peel shells and cool to room temperature (#3)
Cut into a bite sized pieces (#4)
Add avocado and lemon juice and mix (#5).
Make dressing by mixing mayo, soys sauce and wasabi (#6). Taste and adjust the ingredients.
Dress the avocado and shrimp mixture.

This was really good. Although I may prefer the tuna cubes and avocado slightly more, the combination of wasabi, soy sauce and mayo is a good one. The new shrimp was certainly better than the old frozen ones. They were sweet and succulent and I am glad I did not use the old one.

Crab cake sushi クラブケーキちらし寿司

 I made crab cakes, using a recipe I posted some time ago . From one container of crab meat,  I made 5 cakes. We ate two immediately but three were left (see below). This time, I made the crab cake with sautéed onion, shiitake mushroom, jalapeño pepper and fresh dill. I also added Meyer lemon zest (micro-grated), lemon juice and seasoned it with a splash of Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper and bound it with panko, dijon mustard and mayonnaise.

Since we had gotten the crab meat to make California roll, my wife suggested we could (sort-of) stick to our original objective by using the crab cakes to make scattered sushi ちらし寿司. Also, we had discovered, on our last trip to Japan, that ingredients such as tuna salad made with mayonnaise work really well with sushi rice. So since the crab cakes included mayo, my wife thought they should work well over the sushi rice. She made fresh rice for the occasion and I made it into sushi rice.  First, I warmed the crab cakes in the toaster oven and the broke them into small chunks on the sushi rice.

Taking the cue from California rolls, I also added cubes of avocado, dressed in lemon juice and a bit of mayonnaise.

Since perilla has started coming out in profusion in our herb garden, I added a chiffonade of perilla 青じそ.

Finally, I topped it with thin strips of nori.

We had this on our day off as an ending "shime" dish. As my wife predicted this was really good. We thought that since it was a shime, the amount of rice may be too much but it tasted so good we couldn't stop and ended up eating the whole thing. As opposed to just using crab meat as is done with classic California roll, using crab cake added more complex flavor dimensions and texture.  For this, we switched to our "Tengumai daiginjo" sake 天狗舞大吟醸酒.