Spring Rolls are a fucking pain in the ass. My father now understands why you pay for these fuckers.
Plus, my kids are shits. Well 2 of the 3 are. The girl ate these things up. My husband goes nuts for them.
The beauty of these pains-in-the-ass is that they are low calorie, delicious, and filling. They aren’t difficult to make, but they are fucking tedious.
Cut veggies and fruits into sticks: like avocado, mango, cilantro, green onion, cucumber, and carrots (buy the sliced ones and save yourself some sanity in the already-insane prep).
For protein use cooked shrimp you have leftover from the office Christmas party that has been sitting in the freezer. Or imitation crab. Or you could go vegetarian, too.
Follow the directions on the rice paper wrapper. It’s like making small, fiddly burritos with a tortilla that tears easily. Fun, fun, fun!
As we’ve seen before, my husband is convinced it’s all about the sauce. I apparently made one years ago and didn’t write it down so now it lives on in his head as a standard I’ll never achieve. Thankfully, there’s nothing else in our marriage like that.
Here is an easy sauce or two:
- lime, honey and ginger – mix together till it tastes good
- lime, honey and sambal – mix together till it tastes good
See the theme?
Turns out that for 6 people you need more than one package of 14-16 wraps (even if there are 2 kids who only take one bite—my husband thinks I’m misremembering this, but did he do the cooking? he can STFU). So I substituted the leftover nori we had from “sushi” night (that’s another “disaster” I’ll write about). This was a horrible idea. Nori in small amounts is delightful, like around sushi rolls. Making fiddly burritos with it is awful, and I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s chewy and smelly and we ended up shaking the insides out into bowls to eat with a fork. It worked; not what I planned but still edible.
Since I still had all the filling I made ceviche out of it to use up the shrimp and crab. Chopped up all the last bits, mixed with the lime, honey, ginger sauce I had left, added more lime. Next time I’m doing this from the start and skipping the fucking rice paper folding. Meaning, I won’t do the fiddly wrapping again (my husband can make his own damn spring rolls; he loves ceviche anyway). It’s not like the kids will eat it in either form. And I still have a shit ton of veggies leftover that might turn into fucking slaw.