You may remember that one of my New Year's resolutions was to clear out my food cupboards. One of the main things taking up a lot of space are all the leftover ends of packets from my Kitchen Nomad boxes so I'm looking at different ways of using up some of these exotic ingredients. You may remember we made Saigon Summer Rolls a while ago. This time I decided to use up some cooked pork from the Sunday roast and make spring rolls.
Pork & Veg Spring Rolls
ingredients :
1 large carrot, grated
a small wedge of white cabbage, grated
salt & pepper
a drizzle of white wine vinegar
rice vermicelli
leftover cooked pork
1/2 clove garlic, crushed
a small piece of fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 shallot, finely sliced
Thai seasoning
rice paper spring roll wrappers
oil for frying
First, prepare all of the separate ingredients. Grate the carrot and white cabbage into a bowl, season with salt & pepper, drizzle over some white wine vinegar and put to one side. In another bowl, put the rice vermicelli in some boiling water for 1 minute, drain and reserve.
Finely chop the pork and shallots. Heat a little olive oil in a wok or frying pan and quickly stir fry the pork with the shallots, garlic and ginger until the shallots are soft. Sprinkle with Thai seasoning. Remove from heat and reserve.
Line up all your ingredients where you can get to them easily. Prepare a shallow dish of hot water for the rice paper discs. (It doesn't need to be that hot.) Dunk one rice paper disc in the water until it goes soft, sticky and pliable then shake off the excess water and lay it out on a plate.
Put a small amount of each filling - carrots/cabbage, rice vermicelli and pork -in a line in the centre of the disc then fold over both sides and roll it up fairly tightly.
These can be eaten as they are in which case they are called Summer Rolls.
I decided to try out Spring Rolls by frying them for a few minutes in hot ground nut oil.
I decided to lay them on kitchen roll to soak up some of the excess oil, but this was a bad move because it stuck to the rice paper case and pulled bits off.
I cut up one of each to share out - a Summer Roll and a Spring Roll - and we couldn't decide which ones we liked best. I opted for the Spring Rolls in the end to cut down on calories and fat content. Juliette likes veggie versions with just carrot and cabbage. They're a great way of jazzing up the leftovers and can be eaten as starters, nibbles or a main meal. Adding a little dish of dipping sauce - we had Hoisin, Chilli & Ginger or (my favourite) Mango Chilli - takes them to another level.
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Oh wow, my husband would love fish and veggie versions of this: scrumptious! Thanks for linking up to #tastytuesdays
ReplyDeleteOoh I hadn't thought of fish, that could work well too. I was contemplating putting smoked salmon in some summer rolls.
DeleteThese look lovely, never seen rice paper discs in shops though. Will have to look
ReplyDelete