It’s Easy to Make your own Sushi

By Sandy Hu

While sushi at its most sophisticated is undeniably haute cuisine, at its simplest, sushi is just vinegared rice. It’s easy to make a simple sushi. You just heat a vinegar sauce, cook some rice and toss together. Then prep a few no-cook fillings and toast the nori sheets for wrappers. Arrange everything in bowls and platters and let everyone assemble their own sushi.

Vary the filling ingredients according to your taste and budget. To keep costs down, limit fillings to vegetables and imitation crab. For a splurge, add jumbo cooked shrimp, crab legs and sushi-grade raw fish.

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No Resolutions

Each year we make resolutions that we break before the New Year really starts. It’s because we get caught up in the peer pressure of resolutions but struggle with the follow through. In other words, we set our expectations too high and fail.

So the Hunter family isn’t making resolutions this year. Instead we’re setting achievable goals for better eating, exercise and health. And like it or not, we’re sticking to them… just don’t say resolution because it’s a dirty word.

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Easy Apps

By Lori Powell

Happy New Year! My gift to you is a quick and easy-to-assemble hors d’oeuvre to put together in minutes, as long as you have a couple of items around in your pantry. It’s as convenient whether you are entertaining just one other person or are having a bunch of friends over.

The following “recipe” is really a non recipe and is truly just some ideas on what to fill readymade, store-bought little phyllo cups with. The boxes of phyllo cups are sold in the freezer section of the supermarket near the phyllo sheets and puff pastry.

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On Cloud Nine With Meringues

By Katie Barreira

All my life I’ve been a chocolate girl. Chocolate and peanut butter to be specific…or caramel, or toffee, or….

See me at the movies and I’ll be cradling a sack of Reeses Pieces, Milk Duds or for a lighter treat, Junior Mints. On rare occasions, I’ll swing for Sour Patch Kids (there’s just something about that citric acid eating away at my tongue) but generally, my sweet tooth gravitates towards the earthy sweetness of chocolate rather than the saccharine intensity of say, frosting. But that all changed when I met the meringue.

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Celebrating the New Year, Japanese Style

By Sandy Hu

For a Japanese-American kid growing up in Hawaii, there wasn’t a more exciting time than the New Year. Our holiday season was far from over after Christmas. New Year’s brought firecrackers and feasting.

On New Year’s Eve, we kids, dressed in our new Christmas bathrobes, were out on our porch all night, blasting firecrackers, ostensibly to chase away evil spirits. We did it for the sheer thrill, reveling in the bang and flash. The Camel brand produced smaller firecrackers for beginners; the Duck brand was twice the size, making a more substantial explosion. Our arsenal, also included cracker bombs, sparklers, roman candles and bottle rockets.

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