Ana, Nadja, and I thought we’d try something new for school lunches. It’s almost the end of the school year and we are really bored with the same, old same old. So, we tried a recipe for sesame balls that I first saw in one of my favorite cookbooks, Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair, and then read about again in the Washington Post recently. We played with the recipe though by adding some tasty ingredients in the middle of each.
First, I cooked 2 cups of sweet brown rice and then another cup of sushi rice.
Lair recommends using a pressure cooker to cook the rice to make it stickier but I don’t own one, so I boiled my rice. Her recipe only calls for sweet and brown rice and I figured the sushi rice might add some stickiness, which it did. Ana mixed the sushi rice in with the brown rice.
Lari also has you toast your own sesame seeds but we happened to have a jar of store-bought ones, so we used those. You can leave them whole or grind them in a mortar and pestle with salt.
While the rice cooled, we arranged all of the items we want to use in the middle of the sesame rice balls. We had sweet potato I had baked earlier in the day, some cream cheese, tiny pieces of toasted Nori, and some canned wild salmon. The idea was to use one of the ingredients or a combination like sweet potato and cream cheese, or Nori and salmon, or Nori and cream cheese.
With wet hands, we took a bit of the rice mixture, added some fillers, and then a bit more rice, and then squeezed the mixture hard to make a ball.
Then, we rolled the ball in the sesame seeds.
And set the sesame rice balls aside on a tray.
It was messy work, but easy all in all, and quite tasty!
We had some at home with some soy sauce (we like Bragg’s liquid aminos) squirted over the top, but I could also imagine having them with some wasabi mixed in, or even making some with wasabi inside. They can last a few days in a container in the frig.
Do you have an out-of-the-ordinary kids lunch or snack recipe that you’ve tried lately?
