Because this is my thought process lately, especially with Easter fast approaching, I thought that it might help to ease some of my stress a little bit if I was able to find some decent replacements for things that I already love. So, with that in mind, I decided to try my hand at making sushi bowls.
I've always really loved sushi. In fact, the thing that I craved and missed the most when I was pregnant with Josephine was probably sushi. Spicy tuna roll sushi is my jam, so it's hard for me to face the idea of saying goodbye to that. But I've seen a lot of videos on YouTube lately of other people making sushi bowls, so in the interest of replacement foods, I decided to give it a try. It has all of the same ingredients as sushi but without the complicated rolling process.
We're trying to focus on whole grains, so for our sushi bowls we started out by making some brown rice in the Instant Pot. (Seriously, guys, brown rice in 22 minutes. How could you not?!) While the rice was cooking, I cut up a cucumber into thin strips, used a peeler to peel off strips of carrot, and microwaved and shelled some edamame. For my bowl, I also cut up some avocado and some strips of sea weed, but Tony left those out of his because he doesn't care for them. Once the rice was done, I piled everything up in the bowl--nothing scientific here, it was pretty much all to my own taste and desires. I also topped my bowl with sesame seeds and some Korean teriyaki sauce.
A note here about the Korean teriyaki sauce: we buy a local brand from Sunny's Gourmet Products. A lovely woman who runs a local restaurant here is actually the creator of this brand. Her teriyaki is totally vegan, gluten-free, and contains no MSG. It can be ordered on her website, and I highly recommend it. I'm a notorious hater of most things teriyaki, but this teriyaki sauce is probably the only one that I've ever enthusiastically enjoyed.
It was actually the teriyaki sauce that really pulled the sushi bowl together for me. I have to be honest, until recently I've never much cared for brown rice. In the last few weeks, I've actually had more brown rice than white, so I'm growing to like it more. I truly love all of the vegetables involved in this sushi bowl (with the exception of carrots, which I have always hated and eat only out of a sense of nutritional obligation), so this was actually a pretty satisfying dinner. I do wish that I still had a box grater (ours rusted and had to be disposed of) so that I could have just shredded the carrot instead, but I suppose if it was really that important to me I could have also done that in my food processor.
This is definitely something that I would do again. I don't even think there needs to be any modification. In the future, I might add tofu and see how I feel about it just to give that a try or maybe try to make a spicy sauce for it, but I honestly don't even think that these modifications are needed. The only thing that I truly can't stress enough is the teriyaki. I don't think this sushi bowl would be nearly as good with just soy sauce or tamari. I would definitely stick to making it with the teriyaki sauce mentioned above.
I'd definitely call this little replacement a success. It also worked really well for a lunch the next day for me, so it's something that could easily be doubled in recipe in order to have it for more than one meal. It was also crazy easy to throw together. I could see this being a really easy busy night sort of meal for us. It satisfied my cravings for both another successful substitution and sushi--all in all, a win.
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