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Cooking 101 in your kitchen

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Special to The Times

Got a yen for sushi but not for the schlep to a sushi bar or the wait for a seat once you get there? Put away the car keys and take a stab at making sushi at home.

Sure, there’s more to it than throwing burgers on the grill or veggies into the steamer -- sushi is, after all, an ancient Japanese art imbued with ritual and mystery, and chefs can apprentice for years in Japan before mastering the intricacies of the form.

But it can be done. So says Nikki Gilbert, a.k.a. Sushi Girl, a former sushi chef who for the last four years has been conducting in-home sushi-making classes.

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“I got tired of going out to places and paying $100 per person for something I knew I could make at home,” said Gilbert during a session she led over the weekend at a bridal shower in Calabasas. “I just wanted to teach people how to do it for friends at home -- nothing fancy.”

Danielle Walsmith, who hired Gilbert for the shower she hosted for her friend Lauren Tarne, a lifelong sushi lover, says she found Sushi Girl on the Internet (www.thesushigirl.com). “Lauren wanted something that was not your standard bridal luncheon. She’s into all things gourmet, and she loves sushi.”

So 11 women, including Tarne’s mother and grandmothers as well as high school and college friends in their 20s, gathered at Walsmith’s home to learn the secrets of hand rolls and nigiri sushi.

Gilbert arrived an hour or so before the guests to set up, toting several large picnic coolers and bags containing everything from rice and raw fish to fresh ginger and dried seaweed. (Students are asked to provide only their own knives and cutting boards.)

She whips up a batch of wasabi, the pungent Japanese horseradish, from powder. She also brings edamame (boiled soy beans) for her students to snack on while they learn.

The table is set with rolling mats, chopsticks, cutting boards and knives at each place, and Gilbert leads Tarne, who flew in from Dallas for the party, and the others through simple steps to prepare a variety of sushi bar foods, starting with cucumber rolls. She demonstrates and then wanders among the women, helping them as they attempt to replicate her impressive results.

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What she’s teaching them is fairly basic; after one 2 1/2-hour session, a neophyte isn’t going to be conjuring up squid pasta or Peruvian-style sashimi a la Matsuhisa. Gilbert does, however, give advanced classes for those who know the basics as well as private lessons for the true sushi devotee.

Gilbert, who spent three years in Japan working by day and taking cooking classes at night, later enrolled at the California Sushi Academy in Venice, which led to a six-month stint behind the counter at Miyagi in West Hollywood, where she was the only female sushi chef.

A former elementary school instructor, Gilbert now works in sales for a business research company, but she remains a teacher at heart and prefers leading these classes to the grind of working in a sushi bar.

Next up for Walsmith’s group: California rolls, spicy tuna hand rolls and assorted nigiri sushi, including eel and raw salmon.

Gilbert works like a pro, dipping hands in water, spreading rice on sheets of seaweed, deftly slicing; her students display a wide range of aptitudes for the task, some creating perfect replicas, some mutant.

“This is sad,” laughs Alyson Davis, a New York entertainment publicist who knows Tarne from the University of Arizona. “I can’t even do this part right,” she says, attempting to slice a cucumber into neat sticks. “Do we have to eat our own? Can I eat someone else’s?”

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Gilbert conducts her lessons for parties of 10 or more and charges $55 per person. She’s done them for birthday and bachelorette parties, as well as for business groups looking for bonding exercises.

But sushi isn’t the only specialty cuisine being taught in the home. Neela Paniz, founder and executive chef of Bombay Cafe in West Los Angeles, has been teaching Indian cooking in people’s homes for eight years. She also offers different levels of instruction, from amateur to professional. And raw foods chef Lesa Carlson, who has a restaurant (e on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood) opening at the end of the month and a book (“Simply Raw”) coming out next year, has taught raw-foods preparation in private homes and plans to resume the classes, once her restaurant is up and running.

These chefs say customers might be surprised to find that they could get instruction from someone at a favorite restaurant. A Wolfgang Puck isn’t likely to do it, but Spago executive chef Lee Hefter very well might, says a Spago spokesman, and Jennifer Naylor, exec chef at Wolfgang Puck-owned Granita in Malibu, definitely does.

Customers frequently ask Andre Guerrero, chef-owner of Max and Senor Fred in Sherman Oaks, to teach them how to prepare some of his signature dishes, which he says he’ll do when time allows -- and the money is right.

For someone like bride-to-be Tarne, learning to make one of her favorite types of food is an ideal alternative to the traditional tea-and-cake shower and party games. “I hate ‘foofy’ bridal showers,” she says, sipping a glass of Chardonnay between bites of California roll. “My mom has been taking me to sushi bars since I was 3. This is so much better than everybody just sitting and eating.”

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DIY sushi

Ready to start making sushi at home? Get a bento knife, a bamboo rolling mat (sushimaki sudare or makisu), metal chopsticks, a plastic rice paddle (shamoji) or wooden spoon, and perhaps a wooden sushi press (oshiwaku). Many of these items are available on the Web at www.cooking.com and other cooking-specialty Web sites.

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