Welcome to the Funky Food section of Chrutil's domain.

One of the fun things about cooking is the journey in discovering what works and what doesn't. Since I enjoy learning to cook I'll try to describe some of my findings, and I'll let you be the judge whether to try or stay away from it. As you'll see below, the point of the journey is not to arrive.

Jansons Sushi

What do you do if you're aching for sushi, but you don't want to go out to eat, and you don't want to go out and buy take-out (or call for delivery), but you do have some basic sushi ingredients and gear (rice, seaweed sheets, etc.) but you have nothing to put in it (no salmon, shrimps or avocado) - and naturally you're too lazy to go out and buy ingredients too.

Well, you can either eat something else, or do what I did - I remembered the legend of the "Janson's Temptation" (Janson's frestelse). According to legend, this dish was invented when some guy, most likely by the name of Janson, had some friends over at his house and he didn't have anything to offer to eat so he just took what he had in the fridge and came up with Janson's Temptation. Well, I thought about him (or maybe that was Mrs. Janson - what do I know?) and I thought I'd do the same thing - see what I have and make something fun out of it. The alternative was canned soup, but I already had that for lunch. Anyway, I wanted sushi, so I started looking for something to put in it. This is what I found: A couple of hot dogs and an onion (a little soft and squishy, but what the hell).

Oooookaaaayyyy. Stepping back taking a deep breath - this was going to be a challenge, but my upcoming creation started to visualize itself in my mind. I was going to make Hotdog Sushi.

I started by doing the normal sushi preparation, washing the rice, and cooking it. After cooking the rice I tossed it in some seasoned rice vinegar. This was mostly done by habit, but it might have been a mistake - I'm still not sure that the rice vinegar is appropriate for hotdog sushi rice. More on that below.
Once the rice was done, I applied it onto two seaweed sheets - I always make the rolls with rice outside since I like that better. While the rice was cooking I had boiled two turkey hotdogs and cut them up in thin slices. I also chopped some of the onion.
I put the hot dog slices on the seaweed bed and spread some of the chopped onion on it. To spice it up a little I put some sesame seeds and a little cayenne pepper on it too. Cool! Not only was I going to make Hotdog Sushi, I was making Spicy Hotdog Sushi! Then, in another strike of genius, I poured some mustard and some ketchup to the whole deal (this is still inside the roll).
I rolled the stuff together and cut it up into pieces. I was ready to try it out.

The Experience.
Not sure how to describe this, but initially I couldn't figure out what to dip these things in. I mean, you could go sushi-classic and dip them in soy sauce with wasabi, but somehow that didn't feel like it would fly, so I also poured out some mustard and ketchup to use for dip sauce. With all this I had a chilled Sapporo beer. This was going to be a dinner worthy of kings.
It was a strange experience because I couldn't figure out whether I really liked it or hated it. First of all there were two completely different dishes - one when dipping it in the soy/wasabi mix and one with mustard and ketchup. I have to describe the tasting separately.

Soy / wasabi: Hmm.. salty... Actually tastes like real sushi. Until... hotdog... mmm. Yum. A little freaky because it starts out tasting like sushi, but then suddenly you are sitting there chewing on a hotdog. Very strange, but compelling in a weird sort of way...

Mustard / Ketchup: Ahhh. Tastes like chewing on a regular hotdog, although you have rice instead of bread and/or mashed potatoes (you have potatoes in the 'half-special' (halv spisse) variety of hot dog in Sweden). Once you chew through you start realizing that all is not kosher here, mainly because the seaweed start getting to you, and you start tasting the rice-vinegar I mixed in the rice... This variety might be better if you didn't mix the rice vinegar in the rice.

The Final Judgment: With these specific rolls I'd go for the Soy/Wasabi version as the winner. It gives you that cool "It's sushi, no wait, it's hot-dog" context switch in the middle of chewing on it. It was pretty close though, and it came down to the last couple of pieces before I could decide. One day I will repeat the ordeal not using rice vinegar on the rice and I'm willing to bet that Janson's Sushi will be better with mustard/ketchup dip if you leave the rice vinegar alone when cooking the rice.

Here it is in all its glory.

More to come as soon as I'm hungry again...