Spring Rolls (with Homemade Yum-Yum Sauce)

Because We’re Obsessed with Chinese Food…

I don’t know what it is about Asian food that is so good. Ever since I had my first taste of fried rice and lo mein noodles, I’ve been hooked. Elizabeth is a fan as well, which makes for a good pairing because choosing where we’re going to eat out is way easier when we both love the same things!

I have made it my mission in life to unravel the mysteries of Asian cooking one dish at a time, particularly Chinese and Japanese food. I have tried my hand at making sushi with passable results, as well as various noodle dishes and fried rices. But my favorites have always been Hot & Sour soup, and pork/spring rolls. More on the soup later, it requires its own story. We’re talking about the rolls today.

Over the past decade and a half, I have found that a lot of foods that used to be considered exotic in the United States are now easy-to-find items at the local grocery store. This is a fantastic development, as it makes certain things much easier to find like tofu and nori seaweed. One easy-to-find item now is egg roll wrappers. I bought a package of them recently and used them to make my own version of spring rolls.

Ingredients:

1 pack of egg roll wrappers

1/4 to 1/2 head of green cabbage

Shredded carrots

2 eggs

Soy Sauce

Butter

Vegetable oil or peanut oil (lots of it!)

Salt

Bowl of water

First thing to do is to scramble the eggs. Scramble them in butter without adding any milk, only a little salt. Set the finished scrambled eggs off to the side.

Take the cabbage and dice until finely chopped. Mix in frying pan with equal amount of shredded carrots and a bit of oil and let the whole thing fry on medium for about 5 minutes. Add in the scrambled eggs and a few spritzes of soy sauce to season the mixture. Take the whole thing off the heat and set aside.

Here comes the fun part. On a countertop or cutting board, lay out one of the egg roll wrappers flat with a corner pointed towards you. Put a spoonful or two of the cabbage/carrot/egg mixture onto the middle of the wrapper, then fold the nearest corner over to the farthest corner. Then fold both the left and right corners inward and roll away from you until the roll is complete. Use a dab of water to make the roll stay closed.

In a deep frying pan, pour oil until there is a half inch to an inch or so of oil in the pan and turn the heat up to medium-high. Please, PLEASE be careful when deep frying, as oil spatters can be painful and there is a risk of fire. To test if the oil is hot enough yet, drop a droplet of water into the oil. If it immediately sizzles and boils away, the oil is hot enough.

Use grill tongs to place the rolls in the oil and let them fry on one side until they are golden brown. Turn them over and let them fry until they are golden on the second side. Once the whole thing is golden brown, remove from the oil and place on a plate lined with a paper towel to collect the excess oil.

They are now ready to eat! Well, ready to eat once you have some yum-yum sauce handy. I finally found an easy recipe for yum-yum sauce that you can make at home, the link is here. The only change I made to the yum-yum sauce recipe linked her is that I used ketchup instead of tomato paste. It seemed to work equally well.

Enjoy!