Dusty Summer Rolls

A recent meal was largely motivated by three key ingredients:

(1)   Spring roll sheets.  I don’t know what motivated me to buy these (gulp) several years ago at least.  They have been literally collecting dust and I finally got fed up with moving it around to reach other things on the shelf. 

(2)   Sprouts!  My sister gave me a sprouting kit a while back.  This sprouter is awesome!  Click on the link to see the detailed process involved.  Sprouts are like one of the healthiest foods ever and it’s easy and fun to see the nutrients well, sprout, before your very eyes.

(3)   Homemade plum sauce.  Said sister is an incredible gardener (and amazing cook) and has recently begun canning to take advantage of her seasonal bounty.  I have coveted her pepper jelly and am not ashamed to admit to hording it from my family and licking the jars clean.  This plum sauce needed to accompany just the right Asian-inspired dish…     

Additional ingredients: lettuce (chose a butter lettuce salad mix), red bell pepper, cucumber, Morningstar Farms “chicken” strips (one of my favorite faux meat products), basil.  I also had some shredded “crab” in the freezer.  This was something that my mother bought for me at an Asian food store.  I haven’t found anything similar around these here parts in the Southeastern US, but this could probably be easily found in most Asian stores in bigger cities.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have any vermicelli rice noodles on hand. 

I also whipped up some peanut sauce—something that I’ve just recently learned is super easy to make: peanut butter, soy sauce, honey, rice vinegar, and maybe a splash of water.     

I decided to wing it, but I wish I had looked into the whole process of making summer rolls a little more because my first shot at making them was a bit of mess!  First, here's the process I used to make the sheets pliable.  I saw this on the Food Network's Chopped a while back and thought I'd just go for it! 



So far so good...

And here's where I realized that making summer rolls are a lot harder than it seems!  Practically all of my rolls fell apart, and they were not anything close to the tight bundles of goodness that I envisioned! 

Incredibly tasty though, especially with the sweet/tart plum sauce and creamy umami-y peanut sauce!

Since I only used 1/2 of the sheets, they are back to collecting dust in my cabinet.  When I give these another shot, I think I'll try immersing them for a shorter period of time, as described here by "Tangled Branches" in Wendy's Garden-to-Table Challenge described here.