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…