Tag Archives: asian

Recipe: Salad Rolls – love these!

Posted by Freedom Fro in Fun with Food, Uncategorized and tagged with , , , , , , ,

Friends have been asking me a lot, lately, what my favourite new recipe is. Each time, I found it hard to answer in the moment.

While making dinner tonight, I realized that, since our first attempt at making salad rolls (aka fresh spring rolls), we’ve been eager to eat them again and again. So, yes, best recent discovery: the salad roll.

Traditionally, salad rolls are Vietnamese. I grew up having them on a fairly regular basis and would consider them to taste fresh, healthy, but honestly a bit bland until you dunk them into peanut sauce. Our household has reinvented the salad roll.

I made a post not too long ago about salad and I hope that it served as a bit of inspiration to the kinds of different things that can be added to a salad to make it a healthy, balanced meal.

rice paper

Salad rolls are no different, being salad ingredients wrapped in rice paper. Interestingly enough however,  I’ve seen them being made on numerous Food Network shows unsuccessfully. The judges complain of them being bland and boring. Allow me to introduce you to a killer salad roll — that isn’t necessarily all about the peanut sauce –then feel free to take these tips and experiment!!

3 Rules to a great salad roll:

1. texture
2. fresh herbs
3. acid

You will find a lot of salad roll recipes that are filled with rice noodles and very little of anything else. I would consider rice noodles to be optional…filler more like it. You have a 21 inch round rice paper to fill, why stuff it with boring, bland noodles. If/When we use rice noodles, we only use a little bit. Again, filler!

Texture comes from a variety of places. The fresh crunch of spinach, thinly sliced carrots, red peppers, cucumbers. The nutty crunch of chopped almonds or peanuts. The tasty bite of sauteed shiitake mushrooms or zucchini. The tender sweet bite of sliced mango or strawberries. I say keep it with the Asian theme (my boyfriend doesn’t agree and I’ll often find kalamata olives, feta, tomato, hummus tossed onto the counter when he’s setting up our spread)

Fresh herbs add SO much flavour!! Cilantro is great. Really great…but whenever I buy fresh basil, we know a salad roll night is coming up. Basil (and it doesn’t have to be Thai Basil) ROCKS in salad rolls.

Acid — it’s incredible how much brightness a squeeze of lime juice brings to a salad roll. I have incorporated acid by a simple squeeze of lime, or else, if I want to put tofu in the salad roll, I’ll marinade it in lime juice and rice wine vinegar and soya sauce. Lemon juice is good too, but I think lime is best.

The spread

It’s hard to provide a recipe for something like this, that we make different every time. But everytime I’m rummaging through our fridge and cupboards for things to use, I always look for some fresh crunchy veggies to juilienne, something green and leafy, something nutty, something to saute, a fresh herb and a lime. We make a very simple sauce of peanut butter + soy and put a few dots in the roll, rather than using it to dip.

salad roll: hers

A tip for rolling the salad roll — set up a frying pan that’s at least the same diameter of the rice paper you’re using and put some hot water in it ( not boiling, because you need to stick your fingers in it). Have a plate ready to go beside you, then rotate the rice paper into the hot water, not losing control of it. It takes no more than 15 seconds for it to be pliable enough to use. I will put spinach on the bottom and put anything hot on the spinach instead of directly on the rice paper. I also ensure to leave a bit of room on the sides so I can tuck while rolling.

salad roll: his

The bf doesnt’ care — most of the time he doesnt’ have a mess on his plate, but he does need to use a bit more care while eating than I do because his ends aren’t as sealed.

Please have fun with this, and let me know what you try out!!

 

Have a good weekend everyone!

 

 

Vegan Swimming Rama – Spicy Peanut Beans with Spinach

Posted by Freedom Fro in Fun with Food and tagged with , , , , , ,

I love the odd way that I stumble into some recipe creations. Last night, knowing full well that I would need to be making lunches for work, I wanted to use some of the carbs in our pantry. So, I soaked some pinto beans, and decided on making another attempt at my previous epic fail of Thai Sticky Rice.

Thai Sticky Rice: what went wrong the first time? It was an issue of trust on my part. I read the instructions on the bag and thought —well that sucks, I do not have a special thai bamboo steamer or cheese cloth, and, decades of rice making have shown me that you need to steam rice IN water, not ABOVE it. So, I soaked the rice, as instructed. But then I decided to cook it the way I would cook any other rice…and well, it turned into mush with that lovely ‘bite’ of undercooked rice in the middle.

This time, I decided to have a little faith in my Western Steamer, that has compartments to steam things above water. I soaked the rice overnight, then wiped a bit of oil in the plastic compartment that fits into my steamer, and placed the drained rice. I put the ‘steamer’ directly over the water and set the timer for 35 minutes instead of 25 (to account for the time it would take the water to boil). It turned out PERFECTLY! *pat on the back*

With perfect Thai Sticky rice, I then had these beans to deal with. The idea of doing a peanut sauce sprang into my head, and then I remembered how much I loved ordering Swimming Rama from Thai Away Home. The Swimming Rama I’ve had is made with chicken. But beans would go great in a peanut sauce…because beans go great with everything! I’ve used this sauce for dipping salad rolls, it’s yum!

Ingredients:

in a bowl that you can get a whisk comfortably into add all of the following:

2 heaping tbsp smooth peanut butter
1 tbsp soya sauce
1 tsp chilli garlic sauce (I use Rooster Brand)
1 tsp rice wine vinegar
1/2 tsp ginger powder
1 tsp cane sugar (I’m just being fancy, because I have Hawaiian cane sugar in my pantry, atm) brown sugar is fine!
juice from 1/2 lime
3 tbsp warm water

Use the whisk to slowly turn this pile of stuff into a sauce. The warm water will help break down the peanut butter and bring it all together. You may have to play around with this sauce depending on the brands of products you use. Just notice that it’s full of items that are salty, sweet and sour. An element from each of those spectrums can be used to balance it out if anything comes across as overpowering.

I put 2 cups of soaked/drained pinto beans into a medium sized pot over medium heat and poured the sauce over them. I then realized (Learning is F-U-N), that soaked beans are not cooked beans! So, I added another half cup of water into the pot so the sauce would have a chance to cook down. After about 10 minutes, I realized the beans would probably need another 10 minutes, so I added more water (about another half cup). At this point, I also decided to add about 2 tbsp of large coconut flakes that I had hanging around. The essence of coconut combined with the peanut sauce and the flakes themselves would add a different texture to the dish.

If we were going to be eating this right away, I would have tossed a large handful or two of spinach into the pot right before serving to wilt it. But, since we were planning to eat for lunch tomorrow, I put the raw spinach on top of the rice and spooned the beans on top. The spinach will wilt in the microwave while heating. Lunch is gonna be gooood tomorrow ;-)