class

I just spent the last five weeks taking an incredible online class about dreaming big and it’s been the most amazing experience.

Surprisingly, I made the decision to take the Mondo Beyondo class in about a minute and wow, that was one of the best one minute decisions I’ve ever made in my whole life. Class creators Jen Lemen and Andrea Sher have put together a wonderful course full of inspiring articles, audio interviews, shared art and photography and “secret missions” that have left me nothing short of amazingly inspired after going through it this past month.

The biggest thing I’ve learned? That I shouldn’t just dream, I should dream big.

What do I mean by that? Well, some of us in the class talked (in the accompanying community site to the course) about the difference between dreams versus goals, and I realized that I’ve always been a goals sort of gal. I am no stranger to making lists of goals that I want to accomplish, but I realized when I went to create my “Mondo Beyondo list” of things that I want to do with my life that I have always kept myself to writing down goals that I actually figured were pretty achievable. The genius of Mondo Beyondo though is that it taught us how to think beyond striving for goals that we know are attainable and strive for the wildest dreams we ever imagined. To strive for the seemingly impossible. To strive for whatever will make our hearts go zing and our entire being sing with a sweet buzz of happiness. So the difference is that now I have a list which includes amazing dreams that I’d like to accomplish that I don’t even know how they are going to happen – yet. And I’m well on my way to accomplishing some of the easier dreams too.

And so I ask, what are your dreams? What do you want to do with the only life that you’ll ever have? Remember, think big.

I know I will, from now on.

If you’d like learn more about taking Mondo Beyondo when the new class begins May 17, click the widget at the right to explore the possibilities.

The other night a friend and I attended a sushi making course put on by a local recreation centre. I love eating sushi so I thought the next step should be to try to figure out how to make it. It looked hard, but what did I know?

We were told in advance of the class to bring a sharp knife, cutting board and apron, but they also should have suggested that we bring Tupperware to take our sushi creations home in. I guess I had been expecting that we would eat as we went along, but not so! (I purposely hadn’t had dinner in expectation of this and so was hungry!)

Our teacher had a fantastic sunny personality and so it was fun to be part of her class. She gave us all printed instructions on how to make the sushi rice but then we pretty much immediately got right down to doing it ourselves. We made the rice, added the special vinegar to it, and then set it out to let it cool. We prepared our vegetables and imitation crab and tuna. Nothing raw was on the menu, I suppose to cater to the people that don’t like raw sushi. (I do, so I’ll have to do that on my own soon!)

Next up it was time to learn how spread the rice onto the nori (dried seaweed sheets). We laid out our small sushi-making bamboo mats and placed a half sheet of nori on it. We then wet our hands (important for avoiding rice sticking to them), gathered some of the rice up in our hands into an avocado-shaped ball and then started to spread it on the nori. The rice is very sticky so it was a little hard to spread it out evenly, but once completed it was very easy to turn the nori sheet upside down and have the rice stick to the bottom (so the nori was on top). We were following this technique to make an ‘inside-out roll’. Then we laid our meat and vegetables on the nori and used the bamboo mat to roll it all up. There is a bit of a trick to it, but most of us seemed to get the hang of the technique the first time.

It was so thrilling to see my perfect little roll hanging out there waiting to be cut into maki pieces. Yum. I think the hardest part was making sure that when cutting the roll apart we didn’t squish the roll and mess it all up. I realized my knife probably wasn’t sharp enough and kept having to wash the sticky rice goo off of it before I made another cut. That aside, it was very easy to complete my first roll and was really pleased with how it looked!

The whole course was three hours and during that time our teacher showed us how to make inside-out rolls (as described) and outside-in rolls (nori on the outside) and cone rolls (which I didn’t do because I find the nori hard to bite through in such a large piece and thought I would probably never make a roll on my own because of this). We experimented with our ingredients and prepared the kinds of rolls we wanted to make, getting some more practice.

It was really great to realize that sushi-making isn’t really all that hard and that you don’t need very many specialty tools to be able to do it. Some ingredients may need to be purchased, such as black sesame seeds, fish roe, nori and the special vinegar sauce, but all of that can be found at a Japanese grocery. Apparently Fujiya is a great place to go here in Victoria, and I plan to check it out soon.

Now I’m looking forward to having a sushi party to put my skills into practice!