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Melissa's Recipes and Notes
Spicy Pork and Mushroom Spring Rolls
Here’s a shout out to my brother Cameron who’s managed to lose around 60 pounds this year. I asked him if he’d been reading my blog, but he replied, “too calorie rich, Mel, too calorie rich for me.” I did convince him that the grilled skinless chicken thighs and asparagus from June 2 would probably be fine for his diet, but I also thought this dish would probably fit too.
Ingredients:
4 large round spring roll wrappers. (These are translucent and made from rice starch)
Few crispy lettuce leaves
200gm of pork tenderloin (lean, fat trimmed)
4-6 cloves of garlic
1 tsp of John West Red Thai Chilli paste (Fairly mild compared to the green version)
½ tsp of Sambal Oelek Chilli Paste (hot)
Enoki Mushrooms
Crimini Mushrooms
Peas
2 tbsp of non-fat Greek yogurt
A little Kimchi (Korean fermented spiced cabbage) – optional
So from the above ingredients even the most naïve reader will be able to guess that these aren’t anywhere near traditional spring rolls. The crispy lettuce leaves I used were from a Boston lettuce, the chilli flavour came from a Thai sauce and an Indonesian sauce for that extra kick, the mushrooms are Japanese and Italian, the yogurt Greek, and if you add the Korean spiced cabbage you have a mélange of flavours from across the world…. What on earth was I thinking? In hindsight I should have probably made the Vietnamese dipping sauce of fish sauce, rice wine vinegar, sugar and chillis to top it off, but I’m not sure it needed it as the yogurt bound it together well. These rolls were pretty yummy despite my scattershot use of whatever ingredients I found in the fridge.
So here’s the method to my madness:
Cut the pork into cubes and peel garlic. Blend both in a food processor to make mince (ground meat in American). Add both the chilli pastes and cook well in a hot pan with a little olive oil (or just a non-stick pan if you want to skip the oil, Cameron). Once the meat is cooked, put it in a bowl and stick it in the freezer to hasten the cooling process. Flash cook the peas by dropping into boiling water and drain a minute or two latter. Rinse with some cold water to make them stop cooking and remain bright green. Fill a wide, shallow bowl with water from the tap (cold is OK). Take one spring roll wrapper and submerge it in water for about 60 seconds and then take it out. This should be enough to make it pliable. If you leave it in the water too long or try and do all four at once they’ll simply turn to glue, so just stick with one at a time and take them out as soon as you can bend them without snapping them. Towards one edge of the wrapper place some pork mince (2tsps), lettuce, two or three slices of crimini mushroom, a few Enoki mushrooms, some peas, a little Kimichi and a couple of small dollops of yogurt. See diagram below to judge how much filling you should have and how to roll your spring roll.
Repeat until you’ve made all the spring rolls. Arrange on plate and garnish with anything you like. I used a bit of the extra meat filling, Enoki mushrooms and a little yogurt.
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