4 cups spinach
1 cup water
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons sesame seeds
2 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon tamari or soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar

1. Toast sesame seeds and grind into a paste.
2. Add sugar, tamari and vinegar to the paste and mix well. Set aside.
3. In a wide pan bring water and salt to a boil.
4. Add spinach and cook until leaves begin to wilt.
5. Rinse spinach under cold water to prevent further cooking.
6. Cut spinach into 1" sections and toss with sesame seed dressing.

Makes 4 servings

2 six ounce salmon fillets
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup pineapple juice
1 teaspoon ginger puree
2 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
3 scallions

1. Mix together all ingredients except the salmon and scallions.
2. Marinade salmon fillets in mixture for at least an hour in the refrigerator.
3. Discard marinade and cook salmon under broiler for approximately 12 minutes.
4. Remove from oven and let rest. Garnish with scallions.

Makes 2 servings

3 medium carrots, peeled
1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
3 scallions, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon pumpkin seeds

1. Grate carrots into thin strands.
2. Mix together carrots, celery and scallions with olive oil and lemon juice.
3. Toast pumpkin seeds and garnish salad with them and egg slices.

Makes 2 servings

1/2 cup sushi rice
1 cup water
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons shallot, minced
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1. Cook rice in water.
2. Stir in rice wine vinegar and sugar to rice mixture; let cool in fridge.
3. Cook shallot in mixture of red wine vinegar, sesame oil and pepper over medium heat.
4. Form cooled rice into balls and spoon shallot mixture overtop.

Makes 4 servings

One of the great things about this project so far is that Shannon is getting more involved with the cooking process. She's been helping me prep vegetables and last night after dinner we flipped through cookbooks together. She picked out the Teriyaki Salmon Fillets and the Crunchy Carrot Salad and I went from there.

I typically have a love/hate relationship with Japanese food. This could be in because I don't live near water and therefore have no access to fresh fish. There was a large period of my teenage life where I was a vegetarian (the lacto-ovo-pescetarian kind that vegans scoff at) where I was willing to try any and all things deemed vegetarian friendly, sushi being one of them. Unlike most people that dislike sushi because of the raw fish, I was turned off by the taste of rice vinegar. I have recently developed a taste for it again, which is good or I would've absolutely hated these recipes.

The wonderful thing about Japanese food, even homemade, is that it leaves you feeling satisfied, but not overly full. Your hunger is gone but there's nothing keeping you tied to the couch ready for a nap. My favorite dish was the Horenso No Goma-Ae (the sesame spinach one) but it turns out that Shannon is allergic to it. She has a lot of randomly occurring food allergies that we haven't quite been able to place at any given time, tonight it was to the foreign-named dish. It's too bad, because that tangy sesame dressing is delicious and makes spinach so much more palatable, unlike the carrot salad, which I didn't care for at all. Shannon, however, much preferred the carrot salad and its simple lemony flavor, and not just because it would not kill her if she continued to eat it.

Were I to make this meal again I would've made some extra teriyaki for the salmon. The meat was exceptionally tender and the flavor was already infused into it, but it would've been nice to have some sort of sauce with it. I did not prepare the rice ahead of time enough for it to stick together very well, but I managed to forge it into Shallot Rice Balls well enough. Not having them properly chilled made it difficult to get them into my mouth in one piece, but what didn't fall on the floor was quite tasty. The shallot sauce makes it a nice bittersweet combination.

Fun fact: apparently "emo" means "potato" in Japanese. That would mean if you ever wanted to eat an emo kid, you could just make a hearty potato and goat stew. Perhaps this will turn up in future recipes.