Fresh Spring Rolls w/ Peanut Sauce

Aw god! I'm so excited to be doing this believe me. Life is so insanely busy right now with super fun but crazy stuff in my daily 9 to 5 then there's the torrential downpour of essays and group work in my 6 to 9 (that's online night school by the way). Mind you, my 6 to 9 is having a hard time sticking to it's schedule, it seems hell bent in taking over my life or what little is left of it. Enough whining already, let's get to the good stuff.

I don't know but perhaps every country in Asia has their very own version of spring rolls and the Philippines is no exception. Just like all the others, Filipino spring rolls are made of the basic minced meat (we like pork), shrimp, carrots, cilantro, spring onion and garlic then you crack an egg on it to use as a binder so the rest of the filling will stick together. Then you season it with soy sauce or fish sauce, a pinch of sugar and lots of freshly cracked black pepper. After that you wrap this in a spring roll wrapper and now comes the good part, you deep fry it until the wrapper is nicely golden brown and, of course, the filling is perfectly cooked. And now the best part of all, you dip the spring roll in sweet and sour chili sauce and take a big scorching hot bite of that crunchy on the outside and juicy on the inside porky goodness! I love that! Anyway, why am I writing this when somebody else has already done it for me? Check out Marvin of Burnt Lumpia's highly informative and drool worthy guest post in Rasa Malaysia.

Well, yes, I did make a spring roll but not quite the same sort of deep fried spring roll that I am really really truly wanting to sink my teeth into. I'm organizing (ergo attending) a black tie event for work on June 1st and I have to be in a dress so I'm trying my very best to behave myself and stick to healthy eating. Oh the horror! My version of the healthy spring roll is really not so bad.



Mine is a copy cat of its Vietnamese cousin using rice paper dipped and softened in warm water and filled with all of this good stuff and has all sorts of interesting textures and refreshing flavours.

Thinly sliced green mango (you can get this at the Chinese grocery in where else, Chinatown, love it!)
Shaved carrots
Thinly sliced gala apple or Asian pear
Thinly sliced red or yellow pepper
Mixed baby salad greens (I prefer pea shoots)
Halved yellow and red cherry tomatoes
Cilantro & Thai basil

If you have it and you like it (I don't), you can also add thinly sliced English cucumbers and I'm sure any other great tasting raw vegetable like thinly sliced yellow beets, blanched asparagus, snap peas or haricot vert would be really lovely. Dealing with the rice paper wrapper is a completely different story so let's just use this video to demonstrate how it's done, plus she's really adorable.



Now the peanut sauce. If you're allergic to peanuts, maybe whizzing a ripe mango with a weeny bit of water, lime juice, lime zest, cilantro, red chili, fish sauce or good old salt and maybe a bit of green onion would be a good substitute. I've never made this dressing before but it's probably pretty tasty. Wow! I just invented a salad dressing while writing this. I wish there's money in this kind of thing. Mind you I should probably have done that instead of the peanut sauce. Okay back to the peanut sauce.

1 teaspoon of garam masala, Thai red curry paste, turmeric & cumin powder (if you don't have these,a tablespoon of regular Indian curry will probably taste just fine)
1 can of coconut milk
1/2 cup of water
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
1/2 a cup of chunky and crunchy peanut butter
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
freshly ground black pepper (and if you have it, chopped Thai chilies would probably be awesome)
juice of 1 lime to finish it

The sauce is fairly easy to make. I reduced about a quarter of the coconut milk until it's oily and then I cooked the garam masala, red curry paste, turmeric and cumin powder in it until it was very fragrant, for like 5 minutes on medium high heat. Then I added the peanut butter and stirred it so it looked more like a colourful paste and then I poured in the rest of the coconut milk & water and added the sugar, soy sauce and pepper and cooked it for about 10 minutes before I stirred in the lime juice. It tends to get oily but the good thing is the oil separates so you can scoop it out later. Let's be honest, peanut sauce is probably not the healthiest sauce on earth but hey, I'd been working really hard so I think I have to cut myself some slack.

I've babbled on for a long time but trust me, once you get the hang of the wrapping thing, the whole thing including the peanut sauce wouldn't take you an hour. Here's another photo before I shut up.