Thai Spring Rolls

Did I mention that springtime CSA deliveries are all about greens and salad fixin's? Lettuce, lettuce, and more lettuce. Scallions out the wazoo. Radishes and baby turnips. Great if you like salads. Like salads every day. Fine by me, but maybe less fine by Amy. She's not quite the rabid (rabbit?) salad lover that I am. So what do you do with a bunch of salad fixin's if you don't want to have salad.

Well, obviously, you go to the internet!

And when you get there, you find at least one awesome recommendation: Thai spring rolls.

Have you ever had Thai spring rolls? I kind of think of them as salad rolls. They're fresh ingredients, including lettuce & carrots and other veggie stuff, wrapped in thin, moist rice wrappers. Amy has pointed out that vermicelli (or some similar noodle) is also a critical component, although I never really noticed that myself. And, of course, there's some kind of dipping sauce. That's a critical component as well. Apparently carnivores frequently include shrimp or chicken, but even as a former carnivore that seems not quite right. One of the beauties of Thai spring rolls to me has always been that fresh, raw vegginess.

So, anyway, last night I set about to make us some CSA Thai spring rolls. Here's how I did it.

First I went to the store and got some spring roll wrappers. Turns out even our semi-lame Food Lion store sells them. "Red Rose Spring Roll Skin." Great.

There were a number of recipes on the web, but they kind of boiled down to "you can put whatever veggies you want in your spring rolls." My restaurant experience with them clearly involved lettuce and carrots. Amy's clearly involved noodles. I decided I also wanted to use some of these other salad goodies from the CSA: baby turnips and radishes. So here's the sum total ingredients:

• Chopped leaf lettuce (CSA) - about a cup and a half
• One medium-size radish, shredded (CSA)
• One medium-size baby turnip, shredded (CSA)
• Six or so baby carrots, shredded (store-bought)
• 5 red scallions, chopped (CSA)
• Bean thread noodles (softened in boiling-hot water), about 1/3 package (had them in the pantry)
• About 1/4 cup chopped, fresh cilantro (store-bought)
• 2 tbsp lime juice

All that went into a bowl, and I mixed it up by hand. Voila, instant spring roll innards.

Sauce:

This is the base sauce that I went with: http://vegetarian.about.com/od/saucesdipsspreads/r/DippingSauce.htm

I didn't use fresh garlic, not because I didn't have any, but because all the other chopping took so long that I just didn't want to deal with it. So I used garlic powder instead (1/4 teaspoon). Also, I decided I wanted some peanut taste to it, because that's what I remember from the restaurants. So I added some peanut butter. I just eyeballed this. I added it after I had cooked up everything else according to the instructions, and just whisked it in.

Wrapping the rolls!

This was the exciting part. It turned what was just so much veggie-stuff into cool-looking rolls. It turns out it's not really that hard. I read the step-by-step instructions here: http://vegetarian.about.com/od/cookingtipstools/ss/Howtospringroll.htm

When all was said and done, it looked like this:

So how was it?

Way better than I expected. I had enough veggie mix to make 8 rolls, and still have leftover mix. Those rolls were great. I really did not expect my first shot at this to turn out so much like the restaurant rolls. They weren't perfect, however. First, I didn't roll them tight enough, and when I cut them in half, the ingredients tended to spill out. I corrected this the following day when I made a second batch of five rolls with the leftover mix. Rolled more tightly, this problem pretty much went away. Second, the bean thread noodles were very limp, and didn't provide the same texture as the noodles in the rolls we've had in restaurants. I'll have to experiment with some other noodles in future batches. Lastly, Amy said she prefers a sauce that is more straight "peanut sauce." Again, I'll have to do some internet research and try some different sauce recipes.

But bottom line was that these were a huge success. They tasted great, and they really did provide a way to use CSA spring salad vegetables without making another salad. Anyone who likes or thinks they might like vegetable Thai spring rolls should definitely try making them. They're much easier than you might think. And they're a great way to add some fresh, raw veggies to your diet.

YUM!

Mashies and Spinach

If you haven't done the CSA thing before, there's something you need to know: the first few weeks are all about greens. Lettuces and cooking greens. Multiple kinds of each. First week was two heads of leaf lettuce, a bag of lettuce, a bag of "micro-greens", spinach, kale, and assorted onions and radishes. That was a couple of weeks ago, but the following weeks haven't been much different.

So you end up eating a lot of salad and cooking a lot of greens. Cooking greens can be quick and simple or long and complex depending on the green in question and how you want to cook it. Some greens, like collards take a lot of prep, while others, like spinach, can pretty much go straight into the pan. Maybe everyone already knows this. I certainly didn't before last year. Learning how to prep and cook greens was a big part of last spring for me.

Which brings us to last Friday's meal. I knew I needed to start cooking some of the greens in the fridge, but I really wasn't in the mood (and didn't have the time) to do the whole prep song-and-dance that goes with kale or collards. Fortunately, we had a big bag of loose-leaf CSA spinach. But greens don't fill you up, so I needed something to go with it. We had some store-bought red potatoes in the pantry, so we decided to make some mashed potatoes to round out the meal.

One more thing that needs mentioning at this point: an odd thing that shows up a lot in the spring CSA deliveries is "garlic scapes". These are long, green tendrils that look kind of like the green ends of scallions, but they are stiffer. They are part of the garlic plant, and thus carry a mild garlic flavor, but they can be a bit weird to use because of their texture. This week I had a batch of scapes, so I decided to throw them into the mashed potatoes and see what happened.

So here it is--last Friday's meal: Mashies & Spinach

Potatoes:
I cut the taters into chunks and put them in water to boil--the usual method for prepping mashed potatoes. In addition, however, I threw all my garlic scapes into the pot with the taters. Once the scapes had softened, I took them out and cut them into small pieces while the potatoes finished cooking. Then, when I mashed the potatoes, I threw the scape pieces in as well. Otherwise, the potato prep was pretty traditional: milk, butter, and salt and lots of mashing with my trusty hand-masher.

Spinach:
Before cooking the greens, I chopped up about 5 cloves of garlic. I put some olive oil in a wok and turned on the heat. Then I tossed in about half the garlic. I like using a wok to cook my greens because the start out taking up a lot of volume, though by the end of it, they cook down quite a bit. My usual method of cooking greens is to add a handful, saute them until they start to shrink, then throw in another handful, and repeat until all the greens are in. Then I tossed in the rest of the garlic, and cooked them just long enough for the last handful of spinach to cook down a little bit. I like my greens cooked just enough, not turned into mush. Once cooked, I put them on the plate and then shake a little balsamic vinegar on them. This is my basic, go-to greens recipe.

So how was it?
Not bad. The cooked garlic scape turned out to just add color and texture to the potatoes, but not much flavor. That was ok, however, because it's hard to go wrong with mashed potatoes. Butter and salt them up, and they're all kinds of yummy. The greens turned out as expected. I had to acquire a taste for cooked greens last year, as I never like them growing up and never cooked them myself until last year's CSA experience. They're not my favorite food, but I do like them now. These were the first cooked greens of the year, and they turned out pretty good. All things considered, it was a tasty meal.

CSA notes:
The spinach and garlic scapes were from the CSA. The potatoes and regular garlic were store-bought.

Here come the veggies!

Last year was our first year buying into a CSA share. The result was good food, a lot of recipe experimentation, and a little bit of stress. Why stress? Well, you don't want to waste all the food that comes each week. And you also have to figure out how to make veggie-averse kids eat meals made from all these veggies. Plus, if you've never used any veggies other than those found in mainstream grocery stores (which was the case with me), there's a lot of: "what is this? How do I use it?" Kohlrabi? Jerusalem Artichokes?

I learned a lot last year, and posted a little bit about it on Facebook. But this year I thought it would be fun to go into more detail about the experience. Thus, "CSA Geek" was born. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Let the deluge of veggies begin!