Quarantine Lunch: Vietnamese Shrimp Spring Rolls

I had defrosted too much shrimp for my Filipino pancit and decided the next day to craft shrimp spring rolls. 

One of the reasons I love East Asian cuisines from Thailand and Vietnam is the heavy use of fresh greens. I was too lazy to cook rice noodles to fill and was only too happy to ditch the carbs and load up on green leaf lettuce, basil leaves, mint leaves, and lots of cilantro.

The first time I made spring rolls was at an English colleague's home. I remember drenching the rice paper so long in hot water that it dissolved completely away. Soaking and handling the soaked rice paper is tricky. I hate any kind of hardness in my rice wrapper, but you don't want it so water logged that you can't properly roll the filling.

I outdid myself on this peanut sauce with not only the chili sauce (which negated the need for brown sugar to sweeten), but also Sriracha, fresh squeezed lime juice, a little bit of rice wine vinegar as well as coconut cream to thin and amp up the flavor.

My eyes are always bigger than my stomach. This bowl holds a lot of shrimp.

Good thing I bought rice paper in which to wrap the seafood and vegetables.

In hindsight, I wish I had chopped up the cilantro stems--I don't like to discard because they've a lot of flavor, but they were kind of stringy and difficult to chew.

My first roll. Not bad.

It's a good idea to sprinkle a bit of water on your rolling surface to keep your wrapper moist. My cutting board is white, and so my rice paper is pretty transparent and a little hard to see.

Okay I figured that to make my rolls pretty, you need to lay the shrimp down first, even though I didn't arrange them very artfully.

After I placed the shrimp on the wrapper, next came the mint leaves. Lots of mint please.

After the mint leaves, I layered cilantro. Again I should have chopped up those stems.

And over the cilantro, I layered basil leaves. I'm going on the hunt at the nurseries this summer for Asian holy basil which is spicier than Italian basil.

Last as if I could ever get enough of herbs, salad greens, in this case, green leaf lettuce.

I think this was the 4th roll I made, and now I'm noticing the edge of the wrapper and the squinched end of the roll.

My last roll. I'm getting better at it, can you tell?

To keep your cilantro going longer in your fridge, put the bunch in vase of water. Sometimes I just wrap the bunch of cilantro in a damp paper towel and then put the wrapped herbs into a plastic bag to then store in a vegetable bin.

And lunch is served. T'was delicious y'all. And my neighbor to whom I gave the other 4 rolls said she was gonna teach her niece to make these rolls.

My iced tea afterthought. Next time I am making Thai iced tea.