Salmon & Tuna Crispy Rice
Birthday dinner for a friend: crunchy tuna & salmon rice, coconut shrimp, lemon meringue cookies. A new series where I cook a friend their dream dinner menu as my birthday gift
Ryan Nordheimer•
November 1, 2025
Last year I made a layer cake for each of my friend’s birthdays:
- Zoe: Chocolate Raspberry Cake
- Parker: Lemon Meringue Cake
- Caitlyn: Lemon Poppyseed Cake
- Me: Pistachio Apricot Cake
- Jane: Tiramisu Cake
- Matt: that Funfetti Cake
- Charlotte: Pumpkin Peanut Butter Spice Cake
- Jonah: Key Lime Pie Cake
Then I became tired of making layer cakes almost every month. Each one would take 3 days to make because each had at least 5 different components. For example, Parker’s Lemon Meringue Cake had tahini vanilla cake layers, lemon curd, mascarpone mousse, grand mariner simple syrup, Swiss meringue buttercream, candied lemon peel, and more Swiss meringue for decoration. And I pushed the cakes larger and larger (3 tiers for Cake Picnic, 3 ft long for a cookbook club I hosted with Justine Snacks). It felt like 2024 should remain the year of the cake.
I still wanted to do something for my friends’ birthdays though. If you couldn’t tell, gift giving is my strongest love language. The primary purpose of all the above cakes was to gift my friends something one-of-a-kind, secondary purpose social media content. And just a couple weeks ago I cooked myself an elaborate birthday feast and realized “Oh, I could do this for all my friends.” Obviously not on that scale because I’m not insane, but a smaller dinner party of all their favorite foods. Luckily one of my friends’ birthdays was right around the corner.
Jane is up first. Her birthday is 8/30. Her favorite foods are:
- Lemon / yuzu
- Sushi, specifically tuna crispy rice
- Seafood
- Eggplant
And that was the menu pretty much. I made tuna & salmon crispy rice with yuzu mayo, coconut fried shrimp with a pad Thai-inspired dipping sauce, sriracha glazed eggplant, and lemon meringue pie cookies (those were a specific request). Most of my friends were out of town, so the dinner “party” was 3 people: me, Jane, and her boyfriend Jonah.
Hooray for third-wheeling dinner parties,
Ryan
Hey! My name is Ryan Nordheimer. Welcome to my cooking and baking site. I’m a 25-year old home cook living in the East Village in New York City. Hopefully you enjoy my food through my own, tried-and-true recipes.
Ingredients (17)
Ingredients (17)
Instructions
Line a 9x13” rectangular cake pan with plastic wrap and set aside.
In a medium saucepan, add water (3 cups) and bring to a boil over high heat.
Once there, dump in the rice (2 cups), salt (½ tsp), and sugar (1 ½ Tbsp). Stir with a fork and then add a lid.
Reduce heat to the lowest setting and cook for 15 minutes.
Transfer off heat for 10 minutes.
Uncover the rice. Pour over the vinegar (3 Tbsp) and mix in with a spatula.
Dump rice (2 cups) into the cake pan and using the spatula press into a thin even layer.
Cover with more plastic wrap and then compress it further using your hand.
Set a small cutting board (or a 8x8 + 9x4 loaf pan works perfectly) over the rice (2 cups), followed by a few heavy cans.
Place in the fridge and chill over night.
Remove rice from fridge. Remove weights and top layer of plastic. Turn rice out onto a cutting board.
Using a large knife, cut into a 4 x 6 grid of squares. Set aside.
Add the tuna to one medium bowl and the salmon (½ lb) to another (if using only one kind of fish, just use one bowl).
Split the scallions (⅓ cup), mayo (¼ cup), sriracha (2 Tbsp), and sesame seeds (to taste) between the two bowls and mix with spoons.
Taste for seasoning. Set in the fridge while you fry the rice.
In a large stainless steel pan, heat over medium-high heat. Once hot, add enough oil to film the bottom of the pan in a very thin layer, around 3 tbsp.
Then lay about half the rice squares into the pan.
Sear until golden brown, about 10 minutes, adding more oil if necessary and lowering heat to medium or medium-low if necessary to reduce smoke.
Transfer crunchy side UP to a serving plate. Repeat with remaining squares.
Season with plenty of flaky salt.
Spoon the fish mixtures onto the tops of the rice squares in large beautiful mounds.
Garnish each square with the garnish of your choice and enjoy.
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