Spring rolls

I discovered these by accident with my father and I've been in love with them ever since. They have everything all at once; sweet and sour, tart, salt, bitter, umami, the capsicum heat, herbal aromatics, the freshness of good carbohydrates, protein ...  

Hey! It doesn't have any fat. Does shrimp have fat? 

It occurs to me this can all be done quite simply by forgoing these fragile rice paper wrappers, but where's the fun in that?  

I learned something by watching a guy on a YouTube video. These wrappers are brittle. They soften when soaked in hot water. I've been over-soaking them. I learned from the video that they can be made wet then removed while still a bit stiff. They continue to soften but it makes rolling them up a lot easier. 

Okay, let's see if I can remember all this. You can put anything you want inside including mushrooms, tofu, chicken, shredded pork, calamari, weird vegetables, any type of noodle you like. 

* lettuce

* napa cabbage

* Julienne carrot

* barely cooked shrimp

* mung bean sprouts, 

* green onion

* mint

* cilantro

I didn't have the proper rice noodles, and do not care to use those precooked soup-bowl noodles, so I used angel hair pasta instead. 

There are about a billion variations on sauces, or possibly ten. This is the most common. Heat in a pan:

1/3 cup Three Crabs fish sauce

1/3 cup water

2 rounded tablespoons sugar

3 Tablespoons soy sauce

2 diced Thai chiles, or any red chile flakes (something hot)

1 large  garlic clove or 2 medium size garlic cloves crushed and finely diced

1 squeezed lime, or 2 Tablespoons  rice vinegar or white wine vinegar. 

You know what? I didn't even taste-test this sauce. I'm just that arrogant about being positive it has all the things that work. Plus I can smell it. 

I'm a spaz about rolling these things. You can probably do better than I do. I tend to overstuff them. 

Spring rolls

I went to a local grocery store well-known for a good seafood counter but when I got there I saw that the company is expanding into the space immediately adjacent, which is a good thing because the place was always too small, but a not so good thing for me today because it will be a few weeks before they have an improved seafood counter up and running.  As it is, the selection was very poor. I noticed the best deal there were pathetic little packages of catfish trimmings. I thought in that moment, "I can do something with that."

The other disappointment is their obvious lack of appreciation for basic Asian ingredients. I intend to head out to the Asian market, but that's miles farther out. The store I was in did have rice noodles but they were the wrong size and they were ridiculously priced. So they can just take their overpriced rice noodles and stick them ... back on the shelf. I opted instead for ordinary Western angel hair pasta which worked out fine. 

So, two very strange ingredients for spring rolls: catfish and angel hair pasta. But that's the thing about spring rolls, they can be made of anything you wish. 

So can the sauce for that matter. I looked at a few sites to see what people are up to and the sites that accept comments are filled with so many wild variations that altogether they render the original post rather superfluous. 

Care to hear something amusing? The name of this local grocery store I went to today is King Soopers. It's been awhile since I stopped in mostly because their parking is wanting. The company has outlets all around town and throughout the suburbs. The outlet I went to is located nearby on Capitol Hill and has always been considered something of a sociological study in microcosm. Due to the high percentage of gay patronage relative to other nearby grocers the place picked up the agnomen Queen Soopers. To exchange the royal gender that way in conversation is to specify precisely the outlet under discussion and creates an immediate place-visualization in the mind of one's interlocutor.  Extending the rough humor along that same line, cruelty based on the obvious and undeniable, funny for its rejection of political correctness, the King Soopers located a few miles away that serves predominately Hispanic customers is called Bean Soopers. Those two bastardizations never fail to crack me up because these happen to be two of my favorite local stores precisely for their specialized customer bases which forces the company outlets to differ starkly from the same company outlets located in the suburbs which you can imagine are homogeneously undifferentiated.  [The remodeling being carried out in the store I was in today is shaping up to make it appear like all the others. But it will be only a matter of a few months until the customer base of the place forces it to take on a character unique to every thing else around.]

Previous spring rolls:

spring rolls

spring rolls

Spring rolls

The spring rolls at my favorite Vietnamese restaurants are served with two sauces, one a loose fish sauce, usually a little bit hot/sweet and another thicker peanut butter sauce. I love them both. But what goes into them? As we see, pretty much anything you like while leaving out all the things you dislike. I'm not kidding. Assemble the usual suspects and mix away to your heart's content. Let's look at what people are doing.

So what's a boy to do? Choose from above the favorite things and put 'em in a bowl. POW! Your own sauce. Mine was disgusting, but not hopeless. I thought for a minute.

Too much Sriracha. Too much lime. Not enough sweet. Not enough salt.

Added water, soy sauce, honey, and peanut butter. Fixed. But it could still be better. I have some sauce left plus 4 whole spring rolls for later. I'll add more honey and peanut to the sauce remaining, then it'll be perfect. And perfectly unreproducible. I'll just have to enjoy it for what it is with the assurance the next batch will be different and possibly even better.