"sushi" news and stories

Bobby Flay better watch his back. We think there is a new star ready to conquer Iron Chef. Soichi Noguchi. Never heard of him? Don't feel too bad. He's not a chef. Noguchi is an astronaut who just posted a hilarious video of himself making sushi in space.

The video is strangely hypnotic, especially when he lets the sushi roll float in space. Definite screen-saver potential.

Last December Noguchi vowed to become the first sushi chef in space and now he's fulfilled his pledge. Oddly enough his bio on NASA lists basketball and camping as hobbies but makes no mention of cooking. He's also posted some wonderful Twitpics from space and even makes you guess some of the cities. Clearly a fun guy to float around with.

The video after the jump.

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• Do you speak sushi?
• It's not like you were going to get a reservation at El Bulli anyway.
• Ruth Reichl gets the post-mortem bio-pic treatment -- kinda.
• Slow cook your way to a split pea-chorizo soup.
• The "Top Chef" bearded wonder bails on the Bocuse d'Or USA competition.
• Flay flies onto the pages of the nation's most-read Sunday magazine.
• Forsake the restaurant version after making this veggie take of this Mexican favorite.

The term "California roll" may prove to be something of a misnomer as students in southern states rapidly embrace school-cafeteria sushi.

This fall, Schwan's Food Service, the frozen food powerhouse and one of the nation's leading distributors of school pizza, rolled out a new line of fully cooked, frozen sushi. According to company spokesman Chad Stelter, schools in Florida and Tennessee are among the most enthusiastic early adopters.

While pizza has long been the backbone of Schwan's school menus, the company is gradually expanding its product line.

"We sell breadsticks and egg rolls," Stetler says. "But the topic that kept coming up in focus groups was sushi. So we took a look at it."

Schwan's tested eight different rolls across the country, staging a roadshow that included a stop at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Tampa. "We have no idea what the acceptability will be," school nutritionist Maggie Giunta told the St. Petersburg Times before the one-day event. As it turned out, the students were big fans –- although their excitement was apparently tempered by adolescent nonchalance.

For the first state dinner hosted by the Obamas, Marcus Samuelsson served White House arugula -- plus collard greens and curried prawns -- to 320 guests on the White House's South Lawn.

Now that more cooks than ever are searching online for recipes, it's easy to map who's serving what for Thanksgiving across the country. Yet many still find it hard to throw out their old-fashioned recipe cards.

A team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History used genetic tests at 31 sushi restaurants and found other fish marked as tuna in more than half.

A Hong Kong restaurant was named the world's cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant. The most expensive dish costs less than $5.

While chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa continues to wrestle with boycotts by environmentalists and plenty of celebrity scorn for not removing endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna from his worldwide menu, savvy restaurateurs at sushi joints like Tataki in San Francisco, Bamboo in Portland, Ore., and Mashiko in Seattle have embraced 100-percent sustainable sushi menus, which means you can toss aside the handy seafood guide in your wallet and enjoy your meal guilt-free.

These thoughtful sushi chefs are substituting sustainable items like Arctic char for red-listed farm-raised salmon; and U.S. farm-raised kampachi in place of hamachi. At Tataki, they're even welding some clever culinary slight-of-hand by swapping silky sustainable sablefish for the red-listed farm-raised eel traditionally used for unagi. They've dubbed it "faux-nagi" instead, and customers are clamoring for more.