Nothing says Christmas like Vietnamese Eggrolls

Someone requested my recipe for Vietnamese eggrolls. My mother wrote up her recipe several years ago and gave it to me when I went off to college. These are the eggrolls that I remember her making when I was growing up. Since then, she has changed her recipe quite a bit. She now uses pork instead of turkey. I have stuck to the old recipe and really enjoy it.

My mom can make a batch of these in one evening for work potlucks or to give to friends. I usually make a lot of them at once, so I only make them once a year for my annual Holiday party.

I used to cut the vegetables by hand but that took a long time. If you have a food processor, it cuts the prep time in half. You can find most of the ingredients in a regular market. However, the wood ear mushrooms and eggroll wrappers are usually found in Asian markets.

I also make a vegan version of these rolls by replacing the turkey with 2 slabs of firm tofu that I have broken into pieces. After I have mixed the ingredients, I allow them to sit in a strainer overnight to leech out some of the water. This makes the rolls easier to cook and they are less likely to break apart. To seal the rolls, I use a mixture of water and flour rather than egg. And I make a dipping sauce with soy sauce.

Eggrolls

2 lbs cabbage, shredded
3/4 lb onion, shredded
4 carrots, peeled and shredded
1 bag bean thread or rice vermicelli noodles, soaked in warm water for 15 minutes and cut into strips
1/2 oz dried wood ear mushrooms, soaked in warm water for 15 minutes, rinsed and then chopped into strips
2 lbs ground turkey
2 tbs sugar
1 tbs salt
1 tbs black pepper
1/6 tbs MSG
2 bags eggroll wrappers
1 egg, slightly beaten
Vegetable oil

Mix all of the ingredients together up to MSG. The wrappers are frozen and need to sit on the counter for a couple of hours to thaw. To wrap, place a wrapper in front of you on its point so that it looks like a diamond. Put 1-2 tbs of the mixture on the top third of the diamond. Shape the mixture into a longish tube. Fold in the sides. Fold the top point down over the mixture and continue to roll the wrapper until you have about 1/4 inch of wrapper left. Smear that part with some egg and roll the wrapper over to seal.

This recipe makes 50 eggrolls. You can make make the mixture and wrap the rolls one day ahead. If you're stacking the rolls for storing overnight, be sure to slip in some wax paper to keep the top stacks from sticking to the bottom.

When you're ready to fry them, heat a pan with at least 2 inches of oil in it to 275 Fahrenheit. Drop in a few rolls and cook them until they are golden brown on the outside. To make sure they are cooked through, you can cut into one and if the cabbage is translucent, then the roll is done.

I serve these rolls with a dipping sauce made with equal parts fish sauce, sugar, water and white vinegar. Mix all of the ingredients together until the sugar is fully dissolved. You can add shredded carrots and sliced garlic for more flavor.

To make a meal, you can serve cut eggrolls on top of a bed of rice noodles with shredded lettuce, carrots, basil, mint and bean sprouts with the dipping sauce on the side.

Pork Chop Redux

I created a pork chop recipe in Paris from flavors that I remembered sampling when I lived there several years ago. Since returning to the States, I have had occasion to refine the recipe. Since friends have been asking for it, I thought I would write it up with ingredient amounts and whatnot.

Pork Chops with Mushrooms and Creme Fraiche Sauce

5 pork chops, thin-sliced
salt and pepper
3 cloves chopped garlic
1/2 lb mushrooms, sliced (I usually use cremini, but you can really use anything)
1/4 cup white wine or vermouth
1 cup creme fraiche*

Preheat oven to 350. Sprinkle salt and pepper the pork chops. Heat up a cast iron skillet or heavy duty metal skillet until very hot. Sear the pork chops until brown on both sides. Take care not to cook them too long or they'll dry out, especially if you're using boneless. Take the pan off the heat. Remove the pork chops. Return pan to medium heat, add olive oil and chopped garlic. Saute until fragrant, then add the mushrooms. Cook them down until the is very little liquid. Add white wine and cook until the mixture reduces a little. Stir to deglaze the pan. Stir in the creme fraiche. Cook until it thickens. Add the pork chops for a couple of minutes turning to coat with sauce. Place the pan in the oven for 10 minutes to finish cooking the pork chops.

*Creme fraiche is really easy to make with a little time. You take two cups of heavy whipping cream and mix it with two tbs of buttermilk. Stir together. Cover the container and set at room temperature overnight until the mixture thickens to the consistency of sour cream. Then you can refrigerate and use. Alternatively, if you're strapped for time, or simple don't want to make creme fraiche, you can substitute sour cream in the recipe. It comes out a little more acidic that way.

Back home again

IMG_3976[1], originally uploaded by anna.purna.

So we're back in DC. I've been busy applying for jobs...or not so busy, depending on the day. I've been doing a lot of cooking and home projects. This is my latest one so far: a jewelry display for my necklaces. The patterns come from papers (bags, giftwrap, random scraps) that I've accumulated over the years. That was the most fun part. That and using the power tools to cut the dowels and drill the holes.

More music

Check out Jacob's performance at the Placard Headphone Festival in Paris. http://feeds.feedburner.com/scallopshell
A big thank you to Chris

Books I've read while on this trip

Can I just say that I love the Kindle. I brought along so many books and only have to carry one. Since I don't have to read for school anymore, I've been happily reading for pleasure. Thus far, I've read:

- the entire Harry Potter series
- The Omnivore's Dilemma
- In Defense of Food
- May's issue of The Atlantic
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- 3/4 of The Blue Fairy Book

What can I say? I have a fondness for children's literature. And I really wanted some reading that was the opposite of what I had been reading for the last two years.

Right now, I'm reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and a new book we picked up in Cairo called Taxi which collects the stories and musings of taxi drivers in Cairo.

A complaint about the Lonely Planet Guide to Rome

The maps in this book, which was published in 2008 were really bad. Jacob and I got lost several times looking for sites that were marked on the map and coming up on random buildings housing something else. It was quite frustrating and put us off Lonely Planet for the near future.

When in Rome, Part II

So what did we do in Rome? Enjoyed the good food, walked around, and rode the bus. It was nice to be in a bigger city and to mix with actual Italians again going about their own lives. We really enjoyed the hotel's location because it was in a residential quarter where we didn't really run into any other tourists.

We did get so see some of the sites. One day, we went to the Coliseum, which is an amazing and always impressive structure. I enjoyed catching a seat in the shade and watching the tourists mingle with the vendors and random people in costume.



Did I mention it was hot in Rome? Really, really hot and crazy humid. Though a little less so than in Florence. After walking around the Coliseum and then standing in line in the sun for 30 minutes to get tickets only to be told that we could not pay for them with credit cards, Jacob and I gave up the effort for the day and went to find a nice park to have lunch.

In the afternoon, we decided to make our way to a less crowded site, the Baths of Caracalla. They are some of the most striking ruins in the city and their architecture served to be the basis for the grand hall of Penn Station.



After this successful outing, Jacob and I looked through our guidebook, a Lonely Planet Rome that was in the hotel lobby and decided that we wanted to see the Apian Road and the aqueducts that were pictured along the road. We hopped a bus and rode out of town and did end up on the Apian Road. Unfortunately, the road is lined with mostly private homes that are walled off. We walked along its cobblestoned length looking fruitlessly for a sign of the aqueducts. After about a half mile or so, we came to a cafe and stopped for a quick ice cream and asked for directions to the picture in our book. The owner of the cafe said that we wanted to get off the Apian Road and head back towards town for the Park of the Aqueducts. On questioning someone else, we learned the photo was of a fragment that was located another 4 km away.

We decided to go for the surer and closer bet figuring a place called Park of the Aqueducts had to have something. We hopped on another bus, walked another mile or so through some dodgy areas where it was just us, some junk yards and some large guard dogs. There was one large aqueduct running through the dodgy area which was interesting but not exactly picturesque. Then we got to a metro which we took and after a 15 minute walk, we arrived at the park to find this intact aqueduct from the 16th century.



It was indeed an aqueduct....but it still wasn't the graceful arches that we were looking for. So we walked a little further into the park to take pictures and see what else we could find.



This aqueduct dated from 38 AD.



On another day in Rome, Jacob and I hung out at the river near the Trastevere area. There happened to be a festival being held on the banks and we saw Romans out and about enjoying the beautiful evening.



Our last day in Rome, we spent most of the morning packing to make our two o'clock flight. This time, we arrived in plenty of time to check in. And we ended up waiting in line for most of that time as the agents working the ticket counter for Egypt Air did not decide to start checking in passengers until 30 minutes before departure. This gave us plenty of time to change our remaining Euros back into dollars so that we could pay the visa fee for Egypt. (We knew from our research that you could get visas at the Cairo airport. However, we did not know if they would accept Euros. We definitely knew that they would accept American Dollars.)

After getting our boarding passes, we were then confronted with the problem of only having twenty minutes to get to the gate, which we thought was doable until we saw that you had to clear immigration on the way out of Italy as well, and immigration was much slower than security. There were no set lines, just a mob of people all trying to jostle their way to the front. So I grabbed Jacob's hand and wound my way through the crowd to get us through to the gate.

All of this rushing, however, proved to be utterly useless because in the end, the flight was delayed 10 hours. Through Italian law, the airline took us from the airport in buses to a hotel and gave us all rooms and fed us dinner. Jacob was very impressed by this service. I was less so when we arrived in Cairo with red rashes all over that I swear we got from that fleabag airport hotel.