We love to make sushi at home. Pretty healthy, challenging, fun and a nice opportunity to work together, take turns with and learn from your cooking partner, significant other, children, etc. Mad props to Matt Ruby for teaching me to make it!

First-time sushi-makers (and everyone else):
The episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown “Wake Up Little Sushi” is a MUST-SEE for sushi-making. It will tell you everything you could ever want to know about sushi.

Sushi Day is an awesome resource for new and interesting sushi recipes. Many are a bit above our skill level, but we’re working on it. These photos depict some of our more successful attempts.

How all of that awesome and somewhat intimidating information translates into a fairly regular family meal: We use and enjoy Tsunami brand rice and nori. Both are available at Kroger, which is really the selling point for us, though nori is cheaper at the farmer’s market. We purchase our fresh fish from the farmer’s market and make the sushi that night. This means we are usually making sushi on a weekend while we do shopping, and while we have time to make dinner at our own pace.

Trying exotic new recipes and tracking down hard-to-find ingredients is always a blast, it is also time-consuming and expensive. Besides, we’ve got a long way to go on form, so we keep it pretty simple. This is the ingredient list for a typical sushi night at our house:

• Sushi rice
• Sushi seasoning (seasoned rice wine vinegar)
• Nori (algae paper)
• Yellowfin tuna (always!)
• Salmon or swordfish
• Scallops
• Avocado
• Green onions
• Cream cheese
• Soy sauce for dipping (optional)
• Wasabi (optional)

With these ingredients, you can get a decent variety of combinations and also work on your form. As far as equipment goes, we use your standard run-of-the-mill knives that we sharpen ourselves. We use a silicon sushi mat purchased at the Viking store.

That’s basically it. The paleo-/primal-type diet frowns on rice, but since sushi is a great way to have some raw meat, I don’t worry about it too much. There’s also plenty of opportunity for sashimi (read as: me eating the fish right off the board while we’re making maki rolls) and nigiri, which can help tip or maintain the balance of meats and vegetables versus grains.

Speaking of Good Eats, Alton Brown and tuna: The Other Red Meat