Kids like sushi

Did you know that kids like sushi?

Growing up in a family of food-lovers, with a niece who counts liver and onions and garlic among her faves, I'm not shocked when I meet a kid who eats more than chicken nuggets and french fries. So I wasn't too surprised when I heard my 10-year old students talking about how much they love sushi. I've never attempted to make sushi, in any way, shape or form, but last week I made "fruit sushi" with my after-school cooking club (which is to say "non-cooking" club, because we have no stove or oven!).

First, we sliced strawberries, bananas and mango. Luckily, slicing fruit doesn't require anything more than a plastic knife, so I could relax a little knowing that my students would leave school with all 10 digits. We tried to slice long, narrow pieces, better to be rolled.

I didn't have any short-grain sushi rice, nor could I find it at my standard grocery store, so I used brown jasmine rice. It was not remotely sticky when it was finished, so I added some honey, but that didn't help much. Another omission was the bamboo mats that you're supposed to use to roll the seaweed over the filling. We just used wax paper, and it seemed fine to us! But I'm getting out of order here.

We spread rice on our sheets of Nori, leaving space at the top. Then we put a stripe of peanut butter or honey across the rice and layered some fruit across the stripe. The kids used a lot more fruit than me, and had some difficulty rolling and cutting later.Having only made one roll each, we really didn't perfect our rolling method, but using the wax paper proved helpful. We found that dipping our knife in water helped cut through the Nori when we were slicing the rolls.
It was pretty tasty, but the construction part was far more enjoyable than the eating part.