Onigiri

Happy New Year, and welcome to our first Foodie Friday link up of 2016! I’m linking up with Annmarie from the Fit Foodie Mama, Esther from Chocolate Runner Girl + Jess from Hello To Fit to create awesome healthy recipes each week! Today’s theme = Lucky Foods for the New Year, so we made onigiri!

While I don’t think there’s actually any correlation between onigiri and luck, I think the fact that I get to spend time with my childhood-high-school-college-friends is all the luck I could ask for.

To me, onigiri is a food that brings people that I adore together–the first time I ever made em’ was back in college with my housemates, and again with some of my favorite people in medical school, so I associate it with rather awesome memories. :]

There are about a billion different ways to make onigiri, but it basically looks like this:

Onigiri is also known as omusubi or nigirimeshi. In the simplest of terms, it’s a ball of rice with stuff inside. The filling can be pretty much anything you want, so we visited an Asian market the evening before and went to town.

It can be time-consuming, but it makes for a really fun social gathering, and was the perfect excuse to get together with friends I hadn’t seen in 298473024 years whilst catching up on life!

The rice can take a while to cool and we were hungry, so we helped the process by fanning it with plates.

We also got Kate to return to her Asian roots–this was the first onigiri she ever made! :D!

Or you can get all fancy and make it heart-shaped.

You can get as creative as you want with these–we just put all our filling ingredients into bowls and mixed and matched as desired.

For the record, this recipe makes a crap ton of onigiri, but we were hungry and it was supposed to feed 6-7 of us, so our initial 3 cups of rice just didn’t cut it. :P

If you want a less messy experience, I’d suggest having a bowl of water around to dip your fingers in to get the rice off (it gets pretty sticky). If you have onigiri molds, that can also help a lot.

If you don’t have any molds, there’s always plastic wrap! (That’s what we ended up doing.) Just lay out the rice on the plastic wrap, add filling, cover with a little rice, and use the plastic wrap to roll it back into your desired shape!

Onigiri

Ingredients:

• 7 cups cooked short grain rice, cooled
• 1 package cooked bean sprouts
• 6 oz. cooked salmon, seasoned with garlic salt + pepper
• 2 cups cooked chicken, seasoned with garlic salt, pepper + paprika
• 2 6 oz. cartons cooked white button mushrooms, sliced
• 1 package nori (seaweed) sheets
• fish sung or pork sung, to taste
• furikake (rice seasoning), to taste

Instructions:

1. Divide rice into equal portions, then roll into balls and flatten. Create a small space in each with a spoon (or your fingers) and add your desired fillings.
2. Cover the filling with rice as needed, and press to enclose filling inside the rice ball. Gently press the rice ball to shape it into a triangle, and wrap with a strip of nori.
3. Sprinkle with furikake and/or fish/pork sung, as desired.

End-of-Week-ish Recap!

• If you haven’t seen my Best of Fairyburger roundup, go check it out! :] It’s a collection of my top posts from this year!
• Are you also a list fanatic? I made a whole ton of lists of goals for 2015, so I went over how I did on em’!
• I got another article published on The DO! This one’s on how to succeed on clinical rotations!
• Have you entered my Nektar Naturals giveaway yet? Go enter + check out my recipe for 6-Ingredient Orange Cranberry Walnut Salad while you’re at it!

Check out other Foodie Friday recipes/themes!

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Interested in getting to know more about any of your super-awesome co-hosts? :]

• Farrah | blog | facebook | instagram | pinterest | twitter | bloglovin’
• Annmarie | blog | facebook | instagram | pinterest | twitter | bloglovin’
• Esther | blog | facebook | instagram | pinterest | twitter | bloglovin’
• Jess | blog | facebook | instagram | pinterest | twitter | bloglovin‘

Join us next week for Pizza!