The Knotty Girls switched from embroidery floss to wasabi sauce Saturday morning at the Prairie Pieces Quilt Shop, 911 Commercial St.
Owner Sue Blubaugh, who offers an assortment of needlework classes at the shop, had been out of town when the Knotty Girls group decided to follow up the sewing lesson with a lesson in preparing Japanese food.
“When I came back, I found out it had moved from hand appliqué to a sushi bar,” Blubaugh said.
Blubaugh didn’t mind at all, as she joined the group to take a sushi-making lesson from Emporian Vickie Vaughn, a retired teacher who lived for many years in Hawaii before moving to this area.
Vaughn set rice cooking before the sewing lesson and had a table full of food and supplies ready for her students. They came from a broad age range, beginning with 7-year-old Aubrey Craig of Newton, who came with her grandmother Linda Robinson of Florence.
“You’re going to make your own wasabi,” Vaughn told the group as she picked up a can of powdered Japanese horseradish.
Vaughn cooks by experience, not by measurements. She added water and stirred with chopsticks to make a paste that resembled guacamole in color and consistency.
“The longer it sits, the hotter it gets,” Vaughn warned.
The wasabi was to be used for dipping, once the sushi had been assembled, tucked, rolled and sliced.
Vaughn had used 7 cups of rice, with a one-to-one ratio of rice and water, and added rice vinegar after the rice had cooked thoroughly.
“The whole house will smell like vinegar,” she said, tossing the rice to mix the vinegar thoroughly.
Vaughn handed out parchment sheets, small bowls of water, and some small bamboo mats that she gave away in a drawing early in the class.
Those were the tools they would use to bring a rectangle of solid green seaweed, rice, vegetables and meat together in a roll of sushi.
“What you’re going to do is moisten your seaweed — not much — moisten your seaweed so it doesn’t crack,” Vaughn said.
“You’ll come up and help yourself to all the wonderful vegetables I prepared yesterday,” she told the group.
Snap peas, asparagus spears, Julienne sliced carrots, cucumbers, seasoned tuna, imitation crab meat and seasoned chicken were among the foods Vaughn had brought from home for the group to use. She assured them that none of the meats were raw.
“They are cooked,” she said. “There’s nothing raw in sushi.”
One by one, the adults and the child came to the table to pick up rice to spread over the seaweed, before adding a row of fresh sliced vegetables down the center.
Use three vegetables, she cautioned, never four.
“Four means death,” Vaughn said of Japanese lore.
In a short time, all of the students had picked up their food and were back at their parchment work stations. Some were making California rolls, using crab meat, cucumber, carrots and avocados; other had chosen tuna or chicken, both cooked in soy sauce.
“And now the fun part,” Vaughn said. “You’re going to roll, roll, roll.”
She deftly used the bamboo mat to nudge about half of the seaweed and rice over to meet its opposing side, then used the mat to roll and squeeze the sushi into a tight cylinder.
Vaughn made the rolling look simple. In practice, the students found it more difficult. Laughter filled the sewing room as the women manipulated the seaweed rolls, trying to make them as neat as Vaughn’s.
Deb Carter, who attends the embroidery class, had invited friend LaVerne Tagtmeyer to the lesson, thinking that with sushi-making skills, they could entertain a group of mutual friends with a trendy meal. They agreed that once the vegetables and meats were prepared, it would be simple enough, as well as fun, to let the guests roll their own sushi.
“I think the hardest thing was to get the right amount of rice,” Carter remarked.
“Yours is a wasabi salad,” Tagtmeyer teased Carter, after her overloaded roll of sliced sushi unfolded onto the plate.
Vaughn offered Carter a set of chopsticks to pick up the rice and other filling that had spilled. There were no forks available.
“Oh, honey, I can’t eat with those,” Carter told Vaughn, still laughing. “I’ll just eat with my fingers.”