I was going to make summer rolls. You know, the kind you get at every Vietnamese restaurant. They are like the perfect food–fresh, delicious, healthy. The fact is, though, it takes a fair amount of work to make them for dinner. You have to soak each wrap individually, then quickly make the wrap, store them under a wet towel while you make the other ones and hope they don’t dry out too quickly. So tonight, as I prepared to make them, I felt a bout of laziness waft over me. No, I wasn’t making summer rolls. Now I had to think on my feet. Pretty much all we had were summer roll ingredients (why I had chosen to make them in the first place). Then it hit me, I could make them, just without actually MAKING them. I grilled the shrimp, I made the peanut sauce (3 parts peanut butter, 1 part coconut milk, 1 part soy sauce) and I ripped up the basil and mint leaves. Instead of the work of wrapping them all up individually, though, I just tossed them on a pile of rice noodles. Easy as hell, probably took like 5 minutes total. Swashed the whole thing with sriracha, and there you have it.
May 7, 2008 at 12:06 pm |
This is a great idea. I’ve made these a number of times both with shrimp and tofu, and actually using cilantro instead of basil, and they are incredibly time consuming. It usually turns out that I’m making them for a potluck a few hours later and by the end of the evening, it’s not unusual for them to be somewhat dry. I’ll have to try this sometime, and also your recipe for peanut sauce. I’ve been making it with half peanut butter, half hoisin sauce. It tastes a lot like the sauce at the Thai and Vietnamese place in Tacoma that I first tried these (they called them spring rolls..but that does get confusing).