Vietnamese Spring Rolls

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!  If your family is anything like mine, you are probably deliciously full and feeling slightly guilty about the amount of food you ate.  But mostly happy.  However, if you are looking for something a little bit lighter to serve at your New Year's function, or you just want something that doesn't require hours of preparation, this might be a nice change of pace for you. 

Spring rolls are great because there's really no rule about what you're not allowed to put in it, so you can customize it depending on what you have in your fridge or pantry.  All you need is to get these two things from your local Asian grocery store:

Spring roll wrappers

And rice vermicelli.

Okay, here we go.

-1 package spring roll wrappers
-2 cups cooked vermicelli, drained and cooled
-1/2 head of iceberg lettuce, shredded
-1 carrot, shredded
-1 ½ cups shrimp, cooked
-a few handfuls of parsley, chopped


Best thing to do is have all your veggies, vermicelli, and any other ingredients ready nearby before handing and assembling the rolls. 

Here are the vermicelli, which you can just boil as instructed on the back of the package.

 Carrots.

Iceberg lettuce.

Shrimpies.

Parsley.

Ready to assemble?  The spring roll wrappers themselves are often sold as these translucent sheets.  They aren't hard to work with, but they do have to be handled decently carefully, like eggs. 

Neat, huh?

Soak them in warm water, and they become these soft blankets that you can work with.  The brownie pan worked perfectly for this size.

Here we go.

Here's what it looks like when they're soft. 

Lay the wrapper on a flat surface, then start lining up your ingredients.  First a row of vermicelli.

Add some carrots for color.  This is something i learned from making kimbop.  Color variety is everything.

And...everything else.  Don't be shy about piling it on.  But notice how they are sorta gathered on the side closer to me?  And there is about 1/2 an inch of space from the edge on either side? 

 

That is because you wanna fold those sides in.  Fold in the sides...

Then roll the rest of it up.

There we go!  Place them seam-side down on a non-stick surface (you might lay down some saran wrap or even spray the bottom of a pan.  Just in case.

There are lots of sauces you could serve this with, but I kinda kept it simple because I was (surprise) running late to a function I was going to.  So I made a simple Korean-ized sauce of soy sauce with vinegar as the dip.  And that's it!  

Enjoy!  Have a Happy New Year!

For a printable version of this recipe, please click here.