So, what's there to do for a grandma, daughter and granddaughter on a rainy Sunday in Spokane? How about spending an afternoon learning how to make sushi!

The Kitchen Engine in the Flour Mill offers all kinds of classes and this past Sunday, we chose a hands-on sushi making classes that sounded as fun and interesting as it did delicious! Chef Alex taught us about the traditions of this Japanese culinary art, proper refrigeration and sanitation techniques, how to find fish that is safe to serve raw and the methods used to assemble some simple sushi treats. Oh and did you know that sushi doesn't have to contain raw fish? I thought it did! Our first attempts didn't really look like anything we'd ever had in a Japanese restaurant before, but after a couple of tries we were producing some pretty respectable California rolls, nigiri and maki. We even decorated some of our creations with the bright orange flying fish roe that pops in your mouth when you bite into it! Alex showed us how to prepare a particularly yummy version of spicy tuna and we quickly added that into some pretty awesome rolls of ours. Learning to work with the sticky rice, the nori (seaweed wrappers) and some very sharp knives kept us on our toes and we were super surprised when the class was over. It went by so fast! After the lesson, we dug in for ourselves. And we even had some fun creating sauces out of household ingredients to dip our sushi in. We got to keep our mats and rice paddles to take home and were invited to shop around the store at a discount after the class.

The Kitchen Engine carries an amazing selection of high quality tools and equipment. We all were in kitchen heaven! Of course I had to have the long-bladed knife we used in class so I could get those perfect sushi roll cuts at home! The three of us love sushi and it's often on the menu for our get-togethers at lunchtime. Now we can do a little shopping for ingredients and make sushi on our own!