spring rolls.

the chicken thai noodle soup made another appearance last week when my parents were in town for a night. in fact i attempted to make the evening a "thai night" with food and drink all representing the land of smiles. the menu ended up being mostly successes, but the spring rolls were definitely a dissappointment. i'd like to blame the whole debacle on the grocery's store lack of spring roll wrappers and being forced to use rice paper wrappers. but in all honesty, that was only part of the problem. the real issue was trying to do too many things at once with very limited entertaining experience. while i cook on a semi-regular basis, we don't entertain more than beer and snacks most of the time, and i think my lack of experience and my overzealous nature to bite off more than i could chew caused the downfall of the spring rolls.

my intentions started off in a good place of course. i did a few searches for spring roll recipes before settling on one that seemed to have some parallel ingredients to my soup, therefore tightening the flow the cash from my wallet.

i started off with the filling, add 2 tablespoons of oil to a medium sized pan at med-high heat, add in:
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 thumb-size piece ginger, grated
2 green onions, diced
1 red chili, minced

let this cook together for about 3 mintues, then add:
1/2 cup shredded cabbage
4-6 shiitake mushrooms, cut into matchstick pieces
1/2 cup tofu, cut into matchstick pieces

as this cooks together a few more minutes, add this sauce mixture to the pan:
2 Tbsp. regular soy sauce
2 Tbsp. fish sauce
2 Tbsp. lime juice
1/4 tsp. sugar
when this has cooked together for a few minutes, remove from heat and add:
2 cups bean sprouts
at this point, i was still safe. this mixture was delicious and when i think about alternatives for dinner, i think tossing this with some ramen noodles would make for a nice dinner. or even over a big bowl of spinach. or seriously even plain. and as the recipe says, in spring roll wrappers that are then fried, they would be lovely. but i used rice paper wrappers, which are incredibly thin wrappers, the results looked like this:
still look pretty good huh? i think they might have been if we had been eating these right away. but being the anal, planner, list-maker girl, these were done and ready to go at 11:30am, not exactly dinner time. so the hot spring roll mixture was put into room temperature spring roll wrappers and then put into the fridge for about 6 hours. the pan-fried results were too greasy (the rice paper wrappers do not absorb oil the same way that spring roll wrappers do), the filling was falling out and they were basically a hot mess. sort of literally:)

the lesson was definitely learned on this one. not every recipe can be tweaked for your own needs, there is something to be said about over preperation and of course, being the hostess with the mostess takes time.