It was just another Wednesday—until our teacher rolled in a cart full of bowls, bamboo mats, and sheets of seaweed. “Today,” she said with a grin, “you’re all going to make sushi. Uramaki, to be specific.”
I blinked. Uramaki? That’s the inside-out sushi roll, the one where the rice is on the outside and the seaweed is hidden inside. It sounded… complicated.
I ended up paired with John, who grinned like we were about to enter a cooking competition on TV. “You ready for this?” he asked, snapping on plastic gloves.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “But let’s do it anyway.”
We started with the rice—a big, warm bowl of sticky Japanese short-grain rice, already seasoned with a mix of rice vinegar, sugar, and salt. It smelled tangy and soft, like something familiar but new.
“Smells good,” John said, dipping his hands into a bowl of water next to us. “What’s this for?”
“To keep the rice from turning your hands into glue,” I answered. (He’d forgotten. Of course he had.)
We took a half sheet of nori and placed it, shiny side down, on a bamboo mat that was covered in plastic wrap. Carefully, with wet fingers, we spread the rice across the nori—not too thick, pressing gently all the way to the edges.
John was struggling. “Why does this rice have a personal vendetta against me?”
“Because you’re sticky,” I smirked.
Once the rice was even, we flipped the whole thing over—rice side down now, with the nori on top. This was the part that made uramaki special. The rice on the outside gave it that soft texture and clean look, but it also made it way messier to roll.
Then came the fillings. I laid down thin cucumber sticks, ripe avocado slices, and imitation crab sticks in a neat line across the middle. John added extra avocado, probably too much, but I let him have it.
“More flavor,” he said.
“More chaos,” I replied.
Rolling was a full-body experience. We lined our fingers across the mat, lifted the edge, and began to roll tightly, pressing gently so the filling stayed in the middle. It took patience, focus, and a lot of hope.
We peeled the mat back—and somehow, miraculously, it looked like sushi.
“Dude,” John said, wide-eyed. “We made a roll.”
We grabbed a sharp knife, dipped it in water—our teacher had told us that a wet knife helps cut through the sticky rice cleanly—and sliced our roll into eight uneven, slightly squished, but beautiful pieces.
And then we tasted it.
It was cold from the cucumber, creamy from the avocado, savory from the crab—and full of laughter. Not perfect. But real.
I looked at our messy station: sesame seeds spilled everywhere, bits of rice stuck to our gloves, a chunk of avocado hiding under John’s sleeve.
We were a mess.
But we made sushi.
Together.
That day wasn’t just about uramaki.
It was about doing something new with someone, laughing through the confusion, and turning a few simple ingredients—rice, vinegar, nori, crab, avocado, cucumber—into something we could be proud of.
We didn’t just roll sushi.
We rolled a memory.
