A new gaming board tile, sweltering heat and sushi

During the last weeks I wasn't able to write or read much on the bloggosphere. I'm really sorry about that because I enjoy reading your mostly excellent post as much as writing some line to you but the last weeks were packed with appointments and deadlines and there wasn't much time to slide into the hobby. Somehow all my colleague seem to have ganged up on me and send me all there stuff just before they leave for holiday...

Additionally we're suffering from extreme heat. The whole week we had more than 30 °C and it's really anything but fun to spent between nine and ten hours at the office thesedays. And after two weeks of hot wheather our flat has heated up enough to make painting sessions more or less impossible. It's difficult to set appropriate highlights with sweat running into your eyes and dripping off your nose...

Anyway I managed to finish a very special tile for my game board. It's a hill piece whose hight raises from 30mm to 150mm. We'll need four of such pieces to create a hill for the AWI game our club is preparing for Crisis 2013 and the test match in late August. Fortunately Bernhard already has two of them. I hope mine will fit. Otherwise I'll have to make two more...

Another piece for my board...

Another piece of modelling my wife, a friend of ours, our daughter and me created yesterday, was sushi. To boile the rice is a bit tricky because you have to wash it several times and after boilding you have to flavour it with special ingredients afterwards. But my wife brought a book from the library which explained everything very well and so the rice turned out well. To form the sushi we used to forms which we bought at an Asian store for about 3 € each. The one for the Nigiri worked perfectly. Just fill it with rice, press it gently and take out some nicely shaped, rectangular Nigiri. Afterwards we covered them with some Wasabi and fresh (important!) tuna.

Making Maki was a bit more difficult. Although the form make a nice even rice roll it was difficult to put in the right portion of rice and mind the right mixture of rice and stuffing. So most of our Maki were lacking of structural integrity. However they tasted good, since my wife developed some great combinations of tuna, Surimi, cucumber, Welsh onions and cream cheese.

A selection of our sushi.

Although these sushi cannot match with those pieces of art which real sushi cooks create, they were really tasty and preparing them was a nice D.I.Y.-activity. I can really recommend to try it if you have some friends who are willing to join you or at least eat with you since the ingredients needed come in packages which are just inefficient for small groups or single experiments...