Freakie Foodie – Dec. ’15

This month’s recipe was inspired by an overabundance of tomato juice and a particularly unique hot sauce. While technically not sushi, it offers a unique presentation and tasty platform for two of my favorite things, heat, and bacon.

Ingredients:

Bacon
Calrose Rice (or similar sushi rice)
Fresh ground pepper
Chicks and Salsa Scary Bloody Mary Hot Sauce
Tomato juice

Directions:

For the steps below, use your favorite standard rice cooking method substituting tomato juice for water. Remember to add about 25% more tomato juice than water, since the rice will absorb less of the juice. My favorite method is to use a small rice cooker I received as a gift many years ago that has never let me down, so these instructions will be for the rice cooker method.

Measure and place the tomato juice into the rice cooker. For each cup of liquid, add one dry cup of rice. Set the rice cooker to “cook.”  Your rice cooker has an anti-scorch feature that will kick the cooker from “cook” to “warm” when the bottom of the metal bowl gets too hot. When cooking rice in liquids other than water, we can use this to tell us when to stir the rice and then set the cooker back to “cook.”  This way your rice won’t scorch and you can tell if you need to add more liquid by the firmness of the rice.

Once the rice has cooked, spoon it into a bowl and let rest for 15 to 20 minutes until it is safe to handle but still hot. Form the rice into rectangular shaped pieces similar to nigiri sushi. Be sure to make them large enough for a small slice of cooked bacon to rest on top. Liberally apply hot sauce on top of formed rice pieces, using a small spoon to smooth it out over the top.

Cut bacon slightly larger than sushi pieces (it will shrink) and place on a jelly roll pan until a hot broiler for approximately 4 mins (depending on the thickness of your bacon). Be careful and watch the bacon in the oven because it can burn very quickly.  Place pieces of cooked bacon on top of rice pieces. Garnish with celery leaves and serve!