Egg Rolls!

Tonight, we made egg rolls. I had seen a cooking show while visiting Rachel… and decided to give them a shot. You have to prep everything up front. This isn’t one of those meals where you can start cooking item 1 while you chop item 2…

So, to start off… you need to cut up some chicken breasts into strips. The smaller the strips, the bigger pain they are to cook, but the easier they are to roll. My package was 1.75 pounds. Here’s the breasts all sliced up.

Then, in very small slices, chop up 2-3 peppers… now, normally I would use a few different colors, but for some reason, Food Lion thinks that green peppers are only worth 99 cents, but yellow and red peppers are worth $2.99 … ummm…. they’re bell peppers… it’s not like the color of the pepper makes one taste like caviar… anyhow… slice the peppers thin.

Meanwhile… Virginia is resting up for the work I’ll be making her do later..

Next you need to mince 2 cloves of garlic, thinly slice and chop a medium onion and grate a few teaspoons of fresh ginger.

Now that everything is chopped, diced, and ready to roll… you can finally get around to cooking.

Put about 2 Tablespoons of oil in a pan, and bring it up to medium-high heat. Add the chicken and cook it until it’s no longer pink inside. I also added a bit of salt and pepper at this point.

After the chicken is mostly cooked, it’s time to add all of the veggies and 2 Tablespoons of Soy Sauce. Now, at this point… I realized that my 14” pan wasn’t big enough, so I had to split the chicken into 2 pans.

You want to cook the veggies until they begin to get a bit limp, and most of the liquid cooks off.

Now that everything is happy and cooked, allow it to sit for 15 minutes to cool down a bit. If you try to roll egg rolls with hot filling, not only will you likely burn yourself, you’ll also make the egg roll break open. I let my filling rest in a colander so that the extra liquid could drain off.

Now was Virginia’s turn to wake up and shine… Her little hands make her the perfect egg roll roller.

First, put a lump of filling in the middle of the wrapper.

Then, grab one corner and roll it over and slightly under the filling.

Then, take the 2 closest corners and fold them inward, then roll towards the remaining corner.

The result will be a nice, tight little package. Just be sure to get the 2 corners tucked in so that the roll doesn’t leak.

We’re almost done here. The last thing to do is fry them. Now, since we don’t have a deep-fryer (as that would be… well.. bad.) Frying always raises a bit of a question, as I have to decide which oil I’m willing to use a decent amount of, then throw away. So, tonight, I did a 50/50 mix of vegetable oil and peanut oil. I put just about 3/4 of an inch in the bottom of a pan, which is about right to come halfway up the width of the egg roll.

Frying them doesn’t take too long, as all of the inside ingredients are cooked… we’re really just trying to get the wrapper crispy with this step. It takes about 1-2 minutes on each side with the oil at 375 degrees.

Judging by the blistering of the wrappers, I’m thinking I may have had the oil just a bit too hot. When they’ve done a little time on each side, pull them out and let them drip off onto some paper towels.

Now, as a quick recap, the ingredient list was:

• 1.5-2lbs chicken breast cut into strips
• 3 Bell peppers sliced very thin
• 1 Medium sized onion sliced thinly and chopped
• 2 Garlic cloves
• 2 TSP Fresh grated Ginger
• Oil for frying and cooking chicken
• Salt / Pepper
• Egg Roll Wrappers

So… out of that, this is what the yield looks like:

Yeah… we got about 20 egg rolls.

These were pretty tasty… but all in all, I think they needed a little more in the spice department. I think we’re going to play around with this now that we know the basics of making egg rolls. They’re just not the same without cabbage. Maybe a few carrots would provide a little crunch… we’ll see what happens in the future…

Salad Night…

Yep… I made a salad. Without scrolling to the bottom of the post to see who’s typing this…I guess you don’t know where to set your level of surprise about a salad being made… If it’s Virginia typing, a salad is nothing out of the ordinary… but if it’s Aaron typing… someone must have found a way to deep fry a salad…

So… without further ado… let salad making begin.

First, we’re going to need two wedges of Iceberg Lettuce.

Look at those gorgeous wedges. Crisp. Green. Awesome.

We’ll also be needing a 1/4 cup of Red Wine vinegar.

And a hard boiled egg.

Yes, I make the perfect hard boiled egg. No weird green stuff around the yolk, easy to peel… The way I do it is to put the eggs in the pot with cold water. Bring the pot to a boil, turn off the burner and cover the pot. Then, let it sit for 11 minutes. After 11 minutes, dump the hot water, add a few handfuls of ice, and some cold water. After about 5 minutes, they will be ready to peel.

So, now that we have the majority of our ingredients handy, let’s start with making the salad.

Step 1. Cook 4 strips of bacon.

I’m going to have to look through the blog albums one day and do a survey, but I think that there are more pictures of cooking bacon than anything else. Either cooking bacon, or chopping garlic.

As the bacon is getting happy, dice the egg up pretty finely measure out your red wine vinegar ( 1/4 cup ) and measure out 2 TSP of Brown Sugar.

Now that the bacon is cooked, pull the bacon from the pan (Do not drain the bacon grease)  and set it on a paper towel to relax for a little bit. Once it’s cooled enough to touch, chop the bacon into smaller bits.

Now… for the awesomeness. Add the red wine vinegar, brown sugar, chopped egg and bacon to the bacon grease and stir it around just a bit… You don’t want to leave it all in the pan too long, as the vinegar will just cook off…

Then, pour the concoction over your Iceberg Wedges.

Yeah. That’s a salad. Now, this is just the most basic version. You could use a bit of stone ground mustard and honey to make a bacon-y awesome honey mustard dressing… you could add onions to the mix if you like onions on your salad… We chose to garnish with a few tomatoes and cucumbers…  I’ve got some more fun recipes coming up soon… so it shouldn’t be months before the next update.

In which I make scalloped tomatoes

Someone sent me this recipe from the Smitten Kitchen via facebook:
http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/07/scalloped-tomatoes-with-croutons/

and it was most excellent. I made it with three types of farmer's market tomatoes: red, yellow, and green zebra. I also used a failed loaf of sour dough bread for the croutons. I had tried to make the "artisan" bread recipe from the boxed mix and it didn't really work out. In fact the "loaf" which resulted was about 1 inch high... but made great croutons! Now for the pictures:
Here you can see the inadvertent flat bread that I am cutting in to croutons.




Next we add the tomatoes:


More tomatoes...


And garlic...



Add salt, pepper, sugar and stir.

Mix with the sauteed bread crumbs in the hot pan.

Add basil, pour into baking dish and top with cheese.


Bake and you have a casserole of gooey tomato goodness. Happy summer.