Rolling Eggs

Egg rolls are a common appetizer in Eastern Asia, especially within the Cantonese/Southern portion of China. They are also delicious. Since I don't eat too much pork (if any at all), I tend to get Spring Rolls when I'm at a Chinese place, and I miss the added protein. On Super Bowl Sunday a couple weeks ago, we went to a friend's place where he  made 2 types of delicious egg rolls. There was also a $75 delivery purchase of wings, a plethora of pizza, 4 types of homemade dip, bread, crackers, cheese, icecream...the list goes on. I think everyone drank about fifteen Keystone Lights, and still no one got a buzz on due the absurd amounts of food.

The said friend that hosted this smorgasbord football party created two types of egg rolls; he made traditional egg rolls without meat and banana cream cheese egg rolls.  Both were great.

I made egg rolls the other night with J but we attempted at making them "healthy".  It's pretty hard to make something that's deep friend into something healthy, so we hardly used any oil when frying them at the end.

I chopped up half a head of cabbage, a carrot, 3 green onions, 3 mushrooms, and a handful of snow peas and bean sprouts.   I sauteed them on a low heat until everything was soft with some rice vinegar, soy sauce, and cheriyaki sauce.  In a seperate pan I chopped up 2 whole chicken breasts into very small/fine peices of cooked them on low heat with some rice vinegar.  When the vegetables were done cooking, I added the chicken, and now we were ready to roll.

By this point in the process, I was starving so every other fork full of the chicken vegetable stuffing either went into an egg roll or directly into my mouth.  We continued to roll and got ready to fry them up! Yeah, they weren't the most beautiful little pieces of artwork but I knew they were going to taste damn good.

We used Nasoya brand egg roll wrappers, which is a premium tofu company.  They have other great products I have tested out like the wonton wrappers, silken, organic tofu, Asian noodles, and nayonaise.  Forgive me for the photo below, they sure tasted good but this isn't a great photo of the egg rolls we made.  Although we didn't use a lot of oil (usually calls for being deep fried or submerged in an inch of oil), they still tasted good and were crunchy on the outside and soft and flavorful on the inside.

You can add whatever you want to egg rolls for the inside. A common ingredient for the protien is meat, but you can also use ground turkey, beef, tofu, or just all veggies.  You can also try new things like the banana cream cheese egg rolls that we put caramel sauce on.  My only qualm was that we didn't put any ginger in ours, and I think that may be an important ingredient to tie all the flavors together.  Have fun making creative egg rolls....Ni Hao!!