sushi dinner party.

a few weekends back i hosted a little sushi dinner party at my home with fellow leicestershire foodies and bloggers alex and charlotte. i love making homemade sushi so i loved the idea of mixing and matching my favourite flavours and teaching others some new skills along the way.

so what was on the menu? i prepared a few cold elements, roasted some crispy duck, steamed some sushi rice and brought every japanese and chinese sauce in my cupboard to the table. this included a very generous array of sauces sent over by lee kum kee - a chinese sauce brand which i'm sure you'll see a lot of here on this blog. i also had some fabulous sushi kits from yutaka which are perfect for sushi beginners!

the menu

smoked salmon

avocado

seafood sticks

cucumber

crispy shredded duck

sliced spring onions

toasted sesame seeds

what would you combine? i began with a mini demo of how to roll a classic california roll, which is made inside out, full of seafood sticks, avocado, mayo and sprinkled with sesame seeds.

luckily my sushi lesson was a success and the girls were soon instagram-ing and taste testing. now for their turn...

alex made a salmon and avocado maki and charlotte opted for crispy duck, cucumber and hoisin. classic sushi combinations. it wasn't long before my newly bought sushi slate was brimming with japanese treats, including a rather adventurous heart shaped sushi roll made with my press.

next for the king prawn gyoza, which i've posted on my blog before. i premade my prawn and coriander mix to save time whilst waiting for my dumpling wrappers to defrost. then disaster struck - i'd let them dry out too long and they were no longer usable. luckily, alex and i quickly googled a hairy bikers recipe and we allowed that to prove in the fridge before seeing if the dough had worked! guess what - it had!

after a small eating interlude whilst making the gyoza, something i learnt to make at the school of wok, we swiftly moved to the kitchen and fried off the little beauties. we did a few with crispy duck and spring onion too so there was an element of surprise on what filling you had.

so there you have it, a few ideas for a sushi dinner party. with a little preparation and perhaps help from some sushi youtube step -by-steps, it's a really fun and sociable dinner idea, which of course calls for a bottle of japanese beer too. kanpai!

note: the lee kum kee sauce and yutaka sushi kits which feature in this post were complimentary, although i had already planned the dinner party and was not expected to include them.