Spring rolls

Holidays, for us, are often days of cooking. I like to dedicate the second day of a three-day weekend to cooking, usually so I can spend the third day completely relaxing and hopefully doing nothing more than eating.

We started off with some nice egg-filled tacos fro breakfast. I like to fill mine with chipotle sauce, egg, cilantro, white onion, tomato, and cheese. We were out of our normal Mexican cheese (I have no idea what it's called), so I used Muenster which I think subbed in quite nicely.

On to the spring rolls. We typically make these only once a year but it's actually been about three years since we've made these. And I have to say that even though I expected them to take a long time, they still took way longer than I expected.

Here's the filling I like to use, based on my mom's recipe:

- pork slices, marinated in cornstarch, s+p, and soy sauce
- tiny shrimp, washed and picked over for shells
- carrots, peeled, sliced into pork-sized pieces, and microwaved until soft, about 8 minutes for today's batch, but typically 2-3 minutes
- dried shitake mushrooms, reconstituted in warm water, squeezed, stems cut off, and sliced.
- napa cabbage, sliced the same size as the pork, lightly boiled, and squeezed

All that prep work took a hearty five hours. Once it's all prepped, I saute them up in the order shown above in two pans, because one just isn't big enough. Then I let that cool while I prepare the "paste," a mixture of flour and water, heated up to a paste-like consistency.

Then J joins me at the table for folding. After folding 80 spring rolls -- and finding room for them on trays to freeze in the freezer -- we were exhausted.




I did take a break about halfway through when we were short on tray-space to fry some up. I figured it would remind J why he was folding his fingers off. Sadly, I think it's more of a focus-ruiner. Next time, we'll save the eating for last.

Today, we bagged the spring rolls into 6-roll packages to fry up during the year. 80 spring rolls... that should last for a while!


J and I just recently got cable. I've been pretty anti-tv mostly because I don't want to spend hours in front of the tv. With the coming of DVR however, I've become a pretty hard-core couch potato. The DVR is full of cooking shows: Bourdain (Travel, I know), Boulud, Lawson, Chiarello, Flay (hey, I like his grilling!). It was the first time I had ever actually watched Nigella but her recipes seemed very quick, easy, and tasty.

So I whipped together her aromatic lamb meatballs and her badenjan. Both are very tasty. The badenjan is roasted eggplant, onions, and garlic sauteed together and then mixed with greek yogurt. This mixture, before the yogurt is added, really reminded me of a Persian appetizer we often have at Rumi's. I think I'll have to alter that recipe the next time we try it.