Homemade Egg Rolls

Homemade Egg Rolls... Anyone hungry?

My cousin came over the other day and made these with me. They were delicious and delectable... and they had vegetables in them. That makes them healthy... even though we deep fried them, right?

So they were really relatively easy, just time consuming.

First we started by squishing together all the ingredients. The ground meat, veggies, and seasonings.

When we finished, it looked a little something like this:






We placed the filling into wonton wrappers, and rolled them up cigarette style.

Until we had a nice pile...

You want quite a few. Believe me, these babies go fast.

Then we set up outside on the deck, to avoid making the whole house and everything in it smell like frying oil.

We waited for the oil to heat up. My cousin tested the oil by putting a scrap of egg roll in and seeing if it started to bubble and float. When it was ready, we fried the egg rolls.

We had to avoid putting in too many at a time, or the oil cooled down too much from all the filling.
When the egg rolls were golden and bubbly and crispy, we took them out and drained them on plates lined with paper towels.

We served them with sticky rice, steamed cauliflower, and homemade sweet and sour sauce.

Delicious!

Cut-and-Paste Recipe

Homemade Egg Rolls

1 lb raw ground beef (as lean as possible)
1 C shredded cabbage
1/2 C shredded carrots
2 T soy sauce
1 T shredded fresh ginger
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper

World’s Simplest Fruit Salad

Don’t let your fruit languish, my friends! I always seem to have a drawer full of sad fruit that nobody wants. When the berries and bananas are gone, we’re left with apples, oranges, melons and a scattering of fruits that no one’s excited to eat.

I’ve adapted Heather’s husband’s fruit salad recipe to help me deal with this problem. It’s probably overstating things to call this a recipe. It’s more of a preparation suggestion. However, I’ve made this for showers and parties and always get compliments and recipe requests. So, here it is:

Choose a sampling of fruits from your fridge, or if you’re making this for a baby shower or potluck, choose a sampling of fruits that look and taste good together from your local grocer. This is good, even if all you have are apples and oranges but it's fun to go a little more exotic every once in a while.

Chop the fruits into small pieces, the smaller the better. For example, grapes are ideal for this when cut in quarters.

Place all the fruit in a bowl.

Add a dollop of yogurt. Less is more here. You want just enough to moisten and flavor the fruit but not enough that you ever have “gobs” or white. No one wants “gobs” on their fruit salad. I prefer vanilla yogurt for this but I’ve used just about every flavor imaginable. Personally, if I’m using plain yogurt, I like to add a couple of tablespoons of applesauce or all-fruit jam to sweeten it a bit.

Gently stir to coat the fruit and you’re done!

I’ve served this as a side-dish at dinner in individual ramekins with a slice of orange on top and the kids can’t get enough. They will literally eat two to three times as much fruit when I serve it this way than when I simply chop it and serve it on a platter.

Cut-and-Paste Recipe

Simple Fruit Salad

www.biteuponbite.com

4 cups fruit
¼ cup yogurt (vanilla preferred)

Chop fruit into small pieces, no bigger than half an inch. Place them in a bowl with yogurt and stir gently. Take a minute to wonder why you printed off this non-recipe recipe card.

Kim Pop: Korean Sushi Magic

My Korean sister-in-law has introduced so much magic into our lives. But nothing more divine than Kim Pop. You can experiment with the fillings for these sushi rolls. Depending on my mood, I've added avocado, shrimp, imitation crab, salmon, and many other fillings. Below is exactly the way Hyun Joo first made the kim pop when I decided I must know how to make it for myself... oh... with avocado added.

If only I could avoid messing with recipes...

Start by getting some Japanese style roasted seaweed sheets and your bamboo roller. If you don't have a roller, you can technically just use a tea towel, but it's easier to get a nice tight roll if you use the roller, available from any Asian market, and probably from any world market or kitchen specialty store.

Next, you need to prepare the fillings. I start with the sticky rice, since it takes the longest to prepare. The perfect method for making sticky rice, according to Hyun Joo's directions, is as follows.

Put some rice (Calrose is what I use, or you can try a sushi rice) in a rice cooker. I usually add around 3-4 Cups. Soak the rice for about an hour. After you're done soaking the rice, drain off the water, and rinse three or four times until the water runs clear. Then add water to the pan of the rice cooker until it's about 1-2 inches above the rice. I know, this sounds crazy. Place your hand into the bowl of the rice cooker, and put your hand flat on the rice. The water should come up to your knuckles. Inexact? Maybe... but it works.

I've never failed with the hand-measuring technique. You could also make your sticky rice with some more exact directions from a package or research online... But try the Korean method sometime. I love it.

When the rice is finished, drizzle about 1-2 T of sesame oil over the top, and sprinkle lightly with salt, and mix the rice up. This will lightly season the rice.

Next, prepare the other fillings.

Marinated cucumbers:
Slice a cucumber into halves lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds, and discard.

Then slice the cucumbers lengthwise into strips. About six strips per half cucumber. Mix marinade out of 1/2 C soy sauce, 1/2 C white vinegar, 2 T sugar, and marinate them in this sauce until you're ready to roll your kim pop.

Sautéed spinach with garlic:

Sauté 2-3 C fresh spinach— preferably, or frozen if that's what you have, with 2 T olive oil and 1 heaping T minced garlic. Frozen spinach is what I had on hand, as you can see from my photo, and it turned out just wonderfully. If you use frozen, you should still use the whole leaf kind, not chopped. It's better for laying out in your sushi roll.

Sauté until spinach leaves are soft and bubbling. Set aside to cool.

Egg strips. You can use the egg, or replace with another protein. I've seen my sister in law use hot dogs. Honest, I swear. I am not a fan of this substitution. I have used shrimp, crab, imitation crab, salmon, and ham. The egg is the original thing I learned to do, so that's what I used this time.

Mix two eggs up in a bowl, and pour into a hot skillet. Cook like an omelet, flipping to cook both sides, and then remove from the pan, and cut into thin strips with a pizza cutter or kitchen shears.


Next shred carrots: approximately 1-2 cups. Sauté the carrots in a frying pan with a little salt, pepper, and olive oil. Drizzle just a little sesame oil over the carrots for flavor, and set aside.

Avocado: Slice into thin strips.

When you're ready to make your sushi rolls, set up a workstation with all the ingredients, and place your bamboo roller over top of a tea towel.

Lay a sheet of seaweed on the bamboo roller, and cover the entire surface with a thin layer of sushi rice.

Then lay your fillings at the near end as pictured below.

Roll up the sushi roll as tightly as you can.



Then roll it up in the bamboo roller, as tightly as you can.

roll the tube back and forth, compressing as much as possible.

Slice the roll with a good knife. I always eat the ends as I'm making my sushi rolls, because they are not very pretty, and don't hold together well. By dinner time, unfortunately, I'm usually full.

Arrange beautifully on a plate. Serve with the leftover cucumber marinade as dipping sauce. Add wasabi as desired. DELICIOUS.

Ingredients List

Sushi rice, or Calrose rice

fresh spinach
minced garlic
olive oil
sesame oil
salt and pepper
eggs or other protein (ham, shrimp, salmon, crab)
cucumbers
soy sauce
white vinegar
sugar
carrots
avocados
roasted seaweed sheets

Balsamic Bruschetta with a Valentine's Day Twist

I’m always looking for good ways to serve vegetables and fruits. My kids and, frankly, I get tired of eating carrot sticks or steamed broccoli, apple slices or oranges. One of my favorites recently is bruschetta. It’s packed with tomatoes and fresh herbs and it’s a lot more appealing than handing your kids a tomato and telling them to chow down.

I like to think of bruschetta as pico de gallo’s long lost Italian cousin. Get rid of the onions and peppers and exchange basil for cilantro and you’re set. My current favorite bruschetta recipe is below. It’s made with balsamic vinegar and tastes great on a sliced baguette or with pita chips.

My kids eat it willingly, if not enthusiastically, and it was a big hit when I made it for book club a while back.

Dice your Roma tomatoes finely. This tastes best if they’re deep red, fully ripe. These were not quite ready.

Remove the basil leaves from the stems and chop your fresh basil to about this consistency, maybe a little finer.

Please never use dried basil for bruschetta. If you don't have fresh basil and you’re in a pinch, make something else. The taste of fresh basil is really the heart of this recipe.

A thought on basil - If you can, buy living basil. During the summer months you can get really great healthy plants at Trader Joe's, Whole Foods or your local farmers' market that will grow and give you more than your money's worth of basil, fresh whenever you want it. Just be sure to snip off the ends at the first sign of flower growth. Once basil goes to seed, it becomes bitter. This month I found a sort of weak-sauce plant at Safeway that's been doing okay on my window sill. The next best thing is one of those big tubs available at most grocery stores near the packaged spinach. It may seem like a lot, but you can always use any extra basil chopped up in a salad to give it a boost and the price you pay for those tiny little fresh herb packs is ridiculous.

Grate your parmesan. Buying a brick and grating it is best. Buying real parmesan pre-shredded is okay. If you were to use Kraft parmesan in the green tube with no fillers, it would probably be edible. Add the parmesan to the bowl.

Next add your 2 cloves of diced garlic. I’m lazy when it comes to garlic and, although I know fresh is best, I usually settle for a teaspoon of the jarred pre-diced garlic from Costco.

Mix those up and then drizzle the liquids over top and sprinkle on some salt and pepper. Stir.

For some Valentine’s Day fun, I seeded and sliced red bell peppers and put them around the platter in the shape of a heart and then filled the heart with bruschetta.

It’s a cute idea but in order to make it work without leaking all over the place, you need to completely drain any of the bruschetta that’s not on the plate in the middle or face the consequences of a leaky heart.

Cut-and-Paste Recipe

Balsamic Bruschetta

8 Roma tomatoes
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
¼ cup shredded parmesan cheese
2 cloves minced garlic
1 T balsamic vinegar
1 tsp olive oil
¼ tsp salt
dash or two of ground black pepper
French bread, baguette, or pita chips

Place the diced tomatoes, fresh basil, parmesan cheese and garlic in a bowl. Stir gently to combine. Drizzle with vinegar and olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Stir once more to combine. Spoon generously onto sliced French bread or scoop up salsa-style with pita chips.