Sushi pops!

I cheated tonight and Tetsu and I had temaki sushi for dinner from the supermarket.  The su, in the word sushi means vinegar thus sushi is slightly vinegared, somewhat sweet rice.  Temaki means hand-rolled thus temaki sushi can be held and one's fingers don't get sticky handling the rice.  I refer to them as sushi pops!  (Held in the hand like lollipops?)  Tonight's sushi pops were delicious though with 5 to a plate there were way too many for me to eat (all that rice).

I ate a raw tuna sushi pop. 

"Hmm.  Good!  The seaweed wrap is so fresh and crisp." 

I ate a tuna mayonnaise and sweet egg sushi pop. 

"Very nice.  Okay.  I think I have had my fill."

But as I was finishing up my second sushi pop I got to thinking that blog visitors may not be acquainted with sushi pops, especially the way they come from the supermarket.  SOOOO!  Just because I wanted to take pictures for my blog and write a post, I ate a third sushi pop!

This is a sushi pop.  Hmm.  This one is a salmon roe and cucumber roll. As you can see, it is still wrapped in cellophane.  How to get that cellophane wrapper off without getting your fingers messed up?

Well, that little pink tab of tape gets pulled loose and the encased rectangle of seaweed gets half unrolled from the rice part of the sushi pop.  The reason that cellophane package is there in the first place is to keep the seaweed crisp because when seaweed comes in contact with moisture in the air or from the rice it quickly turns limp.  Still good to eat but no crispness to it.  The cellophane is there to preserve crispness until seconds before the sushi pop is eaten.  Okay...  One end of the cellophone packaging is rolled back and those three arrows are instructions to pull back the cellophane unsealing the seaweed.

Good.  Now the crisp seaweed is ready to be wrapped around the rice part of the sushi pop.  The rice roll gets "rolled" to the open end of the cellophane and then...

The left side of the seaweed gets pulled away from the cellophane (just getting to that point in the above photo.)

There we go.  The cellophane is discarded and the sushi roll can roll back the way it came completely encasing itself in the crispy seaweed.

 Ta-da!  My hands are clean and my sushi pop is ready to eat, fresh, crispy and delicious! 

I contemplated handing this sushi pop over to Tetsu but as he'd eaten 5 pops from his own plate and was probably going to eat the two pops left on my plate (he did), I went ahead and ate my third sushi pop.  I am STUFFED!  But it was SO good!