Sushi Night!

Tonight's dinner was quite last minute. I opened the fridge to see what was inside. Lucian, my 3 1/2 year old, saw his favorite salad dressing - a locally made japanese ginger dressing. He asked for salad with "Kazu's dressing" on it. What mom would deny THAT?? So, while he was chomping away at his locally grown organic greens from Four Winds Farm, I scoured the fridge for some more sustenance. I found some leftover rice, tofu, an avocado, nori, some soaked almonds, and an orange. I created a sushi bowl for Lucian as he likes it that way and not rolled up. I created a delicious sauce I read about on 101cookbooks.com, but didn't cook it so it was super fast. Here's the sushi bowl which kids seem to devour:

-rice (brown rice preferable for more fiber and nutrients)
-1/2 avocado, thinly sliced
-1 nori sheet, cut into long strips
-firm tofu cut into 5-10 matchsticks

sauce (simplified from original recipe):
juice of 1 orange
2 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 tsp agave nectar or raw honey, if needed (usually the juice is sweet enough)
mix together and pour over rice.

While the rice was reheating on the stove, I whipped up my Sunny Day At Sea almond pate that I wrapped up into the nori sheets (he tried it and didn't like it - darn).

1 cup almonds, soaked in water a minimum of 4 hours
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp shoyu or tamari (soy sauce)
juice of 2 lemons
2 ribs celery, diced
In a food processor, blend the almonds, garlic, shoyu and lemon juice until it reaches a pate consistency. If you have a Vitamix, try blending it in there or putting the almonds through a homogenizing juicer (in case you have one of those handy if you have a raw food kitchen). Then hand mix in the diced celery. Tastes so much like tuna salad! Makes enough for 4 fat nori rolls (2 servings).

Lay out the pate in nori sheets, add avocado and other veggies like carrot sticks and cucumber sticks and roll up. You can use the above orange sauce as the dip. This is an awesome dinner which can be made in 30 minutes or less if you have the nuts soaked.

If you're not into making nut pate, but love tuna, use tuna salad to make these rolls instead of making a tuna salad sandwich. Just skip the bread and go for the nori which is super high in nutrients including calcium and iron.

Lucian had some vanilla "milk" for dessert. Its an almond-hemp milk I made and added ground vanilla and a handful of dates. Sweet, yummy and full of nutrients. I'm going to freeze some tonight in popsicle molds to have vanilla popsicles tomorrow.