Fairy-tale salad and fresh chicken spring rolls

I loved the way some of my raddishes from the farmer's market turned out to be purple. The purple ones were milder than the hot-pink edged variety. The two together made for a very pretty salad with peas, garbanzos and butter lettuce.
I harvested some of my cilantro, purple basil and globe basil to make spring rolls. The filling also included mung bean threads, chopped cabbage, chopped butter lettuce and strips of baked chicken breast.

My peanut sauce, which is not pictured, is:
big gob peanut butter
splashes vinegar and soy sauce
1 fat clove garlic, minced
mini glob honey
little shake cayenne

Clean out the cyber-fridge post

Once again, my complete neglect of this blog is resulting in a lame-o post featuring photos of things I ate over the last month but can't remember exactly how I made them. Sorry, friends. I know it seems like I'm saying "Na-na-na-nah-naaah" but I'm not. I wish I could eat these things again too.
This, obviously, is not something I made. Joe and I ate late lunch at a Vietnamese/pan-Asian joint in Green Valley, AZ, after our day at the Sonoran Desert Museum. I always order bun with spring rolls.
My mom and I made kolacky cookies the last time she was in town. These are almond filled.
The highlight of this meal is the quinoa "pilaf" that featured almonds and cucumbers.

Spinach pockets from my East-West Mennonite cookbook.
Homemade Sweet Potato Gnochi with "manager's special" Buitoni Pesto, pinenuts and diced roma tomato.

Pork spring rolls

I mentioned the never ending pork loin a couple of posts ago, right? Well, this yet another reincarnation.

Pork Spring Rolls
10 Rice paper wrappers
1 cup roasted pork loin, cut in thin strips
1/2 medium cucumber, cut into thin strips
1/2 romaine lettuce heart, shredded
10 basil leaves, chopped
1 cup rice, bean thread or tapioca vermicelli noodles, cooked

Soak one wrapper at a time in a casserole dish of warm water. To fill, place a small amount of each of the fillings in a neat and evenly distributed pile centered about 2 inches from the upper edge of the wrapper. Fold the upper edge over the fillings, then fold the sides inward before rolling as tightly as possible.

Dipping sauce:
I'm sorry, I didn't measure, but I used
Crunchy peanut butter
Thai chili sauce
brown sugar
soy sauce
rice vinegar

Improvised meal

Just when you thought you'd heard it all about fusion food... comes a new experimental snack by me. :-) This is going to sound very gross, but it didn't taste that bad. And if you've sworn off wheat for a month, then it tastes really good. Introducing Italian fresh springrolls: The outside of the wrap is a vietnamese rice paper , soaked for 30 seconds in warm water. The inside is chopped chicken breast, broccoli and slices of fresh garden tomato tossed in parmesan and olive oil with a little pepper. Happily, the Asian-ness of the rice paper disappears and is overpowered by the bolder, saltier Italian flavors. I'm wondering if I could make manicotti with these things? Or lasagna? This might be the month of spring roll experimentation as I just bought some more wrappers.

Spring in fall

Words later...

Nama harumaki

Every Tuesday, my Japanese friends Saya and Akemi and I like to get together to cook and practice English. On today's menu: Fresh spring rolls (Nama harumaki in Japanese). We filled square rice paper wrappers with shredded lettuce, cooked shrimp, bay scallops, cucumber sticks, sliced avocado and rice noodles. Sayaka also made Japanese-style Jell-O, with orange juice and tangerine slices. She said she didn't add sugar, but I thought the natural sweetness was enough. I liked it better than American gelatin.

Spring rolls

My coworker once told me that if I were a food, I'd be a spring roll. After getting over the weirdness of being likened to something edible, I decided it's not a bad food to be... Healthy, fresh, ethnic. Well, today I decided to make some.

The wrappers come dried in a plastic disc and they soften after about a minute or two of soaking in warm water. I filled them with salad shrimp (discovered in the back of the freezer), pan fried tofu strips, julienned cucumber and basil and mint from my container garden.

For a dipping sauce I combined a little splash of fish sauce with a double splash of soy sauce, about 2 Tbs sugar, half a lime, 2 Tbs peanut butter, a tiny bit of sesame oil and a splash of rice vinegar. I nuked it to soften the peanut butter, then stirred til it was smooth.

They came out pretty good...I gobbled the first one down as Joe gobbled down two. BUt the herbs were a little overpowering. I probably had 20 mint and basil burps after eating that little roll. Should have filled them with a nice buffer of rice noodles like they do at the restaurants.

Birthday Bun

Pho fun
Actually I didn't get a good shot of Joe's 'seafood everything' Pho. But isn't my bun (a vietnamese dish with fresh veggies on noodles with a tangy sauce) beautiful?

The dish was pretty tasty. But I wish they'd used mi fun noodles, which would have held the flavor of the thin vinegar sauce better than the slick high-starch noodles they used. Those same wiggly noodles tasted great in their fresh spring rolls.
One of many birthday meals of the weekend, we enjoyed a Vietnamese lunch because Mom studies her tour books thoroughly. The restuarant was full of southeast asian faces and it was close to K&S Market in Nashville-- an ethnic megastore that we perused after our bellies were full.