Dead-Easy Spring Rolls

Nothing to it. All you need is a good friend who passes on a packet of rice paper, and a few basic ingredients such as you’ll find in your ‘fridge (a.k.a. “left-overs”) and you’re in business.

Here we have my set-up for the first of September 2017:-

An old ice-cream carton containing some chunks of boiled chicken.

A carrot, raw, unpeeled.

An egg with a push-pin inserted into the blunt end.

Circles of rice-paper in a plastic packet.

A jar of rice.

A tumbler half-full of raisins.

Salt, pepper, and curry powder, but don’t tell my Doctor about the slat, OK?

Also a saucepan and a grater.

I measure out a jar-lid-full of rice into a saucepan with half an inch of water, and set it on Max to bring it to the boil.

(I realised later that on my first batch of spring rolls I used two lid-fulls. One is not really enough. Oh well)

The egg-with-pin waits next to the saucepan.

The pin? It pierces the air-sac and inhibits the messy seepage-cum-explosion of the egg when being boiled.

Meanwhile, back at the cutting-board – I prepare to grate the two chunks of boiled chicken.

Of course, I can’t use crab or shrimp because I can’t resist eating it long before we get to the grating stage.

Here is the grated chicken sitting in a dessert bowl.

Next, carrot.

“ Here we go a-carotene amongst the veggies green , ...”

The grated carrot joins the grated chicken.

Aren’t we having a grate time?

Toss the raisins on the heap.

The rice has risen to boiling. I drain off most of the water, leaving just enough to cover the rice, pull the pin, drop the egg (gently) onto the rice and replace the lid.

The rice will steam-cook, and the egg will absorb the tremendous heat yielded up by the latent heat of evaporation as the steam condenses on the egg shell.

Two games of Mahjong Solitaire later, the egg is boiled, dunked in cold water, peeled, and placed in a second dessert bowl.

Sprinkle with black ground pepper and curry powder, but no salt. Heavens Above No salt, and you can tell that to my Doctor. Well. You can’t see any salt in the photo, can you?

Ta da! A bowl of grate stuff, a mashed egg, a sieve of cold rinsed cooked rice.

Mix it all up in the pan; saves washing up another bowl.

Now the tricky part.

You need a circle of rice-paper that has been soaked in water for about thirty seconds.

I find that a dinner-plate of water allows me to soak the second circle while I am working on the first. Of course you need to be sure that the phone won’t interrupt you while you are on this treadmill.

I fork out about half a cup of mixture and place it near the edge nearest to me.

If you’ve ever rolled-your-own you’ll know what to do.

Me, I fold the near edge of the sheet over the mixture, away from me, and tuck the edge in and under the mixture. That is, the edge is now pointing back towards me. This will hold the mixture in place while I roll the roll as firmly as I can.

You can see that my first roll has loose ends. I’ll fix that now. The second roll looks better.

I use a wide-bar wire rack to keep the rolls separate. They will glue themselves together if you let them.

Here are seven spring rolls ready to pop in the fridge (not the freezer) to chill out.

Now: Your spring rolls will NOT look like the beautiful creations served up at The House Of Thai. That’s because The House Of Thai use machine-rolled rolls, and the ends are trimmed off square.

You are probably wondering what they do with the ends, right?

I am also told (a web page) that I’ll get better at rolling spring rolls with practice, but you can’t believe everything you read on the web, right?

Munch!

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