Spicy Pork and Mushroom Spring Rolls

We had to take advantage of the nice weather Tuesday evening to finish off Melissa's trophies for the diplomacy tournament she is hosting this weekend and get another layer of clear-coat on the more-or-less repaired patio table top.

This is the fourth year Melissa has had hand-made trophies for her tournament (dubbed Boston Massacre). Her design and her workmanship -- I just helped cut and sand the bases. Pretty nice, eh? They're better this year than ever before because we finally have a power saw to make clean, accurate cuts for those hardwood bases (a DEWALT DW713 heavy-duty 10-inch compound miter saw with a 15-amp, 5,000 rpm motor, to be exact). It sure beats hand-sawing through oak or poplar 2x4, as we've done before, and it should help me through a couple of other projects I have planned for this summer. I may not be into sports, but when it comes to power tools my stereotypical male inclinations shine bright and clear, much to our neighbors' chagrin...

So while I was browsing the hardware store for some new storage bins for the kitchen cabinets, Melissa was forming a cunning plan for a dinner that seemed to take just minutes to execute (about 20, actually). After I cleaned out and re-organized the kitchen cabinets Monday night, the spring roll wrappers that had rotated to the front of the shelf gave her an idea. Enter: spicy pork and mushroom spring rolls with leafy greens and Greek yogurt. Very fresh, very nice indeed. And that's the last of those cute little enoki mushrooms, for now. We had a bottle of 2006 Redcliffe Sauvignon Blanc (Marborough, NZ) that we were already drinking before we knew what dinner would be, and the dish was predictably too spicy for the wine. If we had actually planned this dinner we would have had a nice dry Riesling or an Alsacian Gewurztraminer. Here's to planning...

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

Spicy Pork and Mushroom Spring Rolls

Here’s a shout out to my brother Cameron who’s managed to lose around 60 pounds this year. I asked him if he’d been reading my blog, but he replied, “too calorie rich, Mel, too calorie rich for me.” I did convince him that the grilled skinless chicken thighs and asparagus from June 2 would probably be fine for his diet, but I also thought this dish would probably fit too.

Ingredients:

4 large round spring roll wrappers. (These are translucent and made from rice starch)
Few crispy lettuce leaves
200gm of pork tenderloin (lean, fat trimmed)
4-6 cloves of garlic
1 tsp of John West Red Thai Chilli paste (Fairly mild compared to the green version)
½ tsp of Sambal Oelek Chilli Paste (hot)
Enoki Mushrooms
Crimini Mushrooms
Peas
2 tbsp of non-fat Greek yogurt
A little Kimchi (Korean fermented spiced cabbage) – optional

So from the above ingredients even the most naïve reader will be able to guess that these aren’t anywhere near traditional spring rolls. The crispy lettuce leaves I used were from a Boston lettuce, the chilli flavour came from a Thai sauce and an Indonesian sauce for that extra kick, the mushrooms are Japanese and Italian, the yogurt Greek, and if you add the Korean spiced cabbage you have a mélange of flavours from across the world…. What on earth was I thinking? In hindsight I should have probably made the Vietnamese dipping sauce of fish sauce, rice wine vinegar, sugar and chillis to top it off, but I’m not sure it needed it as the yogurt bound it together well. These rolls were pretty yummy despite my scattershot use of whatever ingredients I found in the fridge.

So here’s the method to my madness:

Cut the pork into cubes and peel garlic. Blend both in a food processor to make mince (ground meat in American). Add both the chilli pastes and cook well in a hot pan with a little olive oil (or just a non-stick pan if you want to skip the oil, Cameron). Once the meat is cooked, put it in a bowl and stick it in the freezer to hasten the cooling process. Flash cook the peas by dropping into boiling water and drain a minute or two latter. Rinse with some cold water to make them stop cooking and remain bright green. Fill a wide, shallow bowl with water from the tap (cold is OK). Take one spring roll wrapper and submerge it in water for about 60 seconds and then take it out. This should be enough to make it pliable. If you leave it in the water too long or try and do all four at once they’ll simply turn to glue, so just stick with one at a time and take them out as soon as you can bend them without snapping them. Towards one edge of the wrapper place some pork mince (2tsps), lettuce, two or three slices of crimini mushroom, a few Enoki mushrooms, some peas, a little Kimichi and a couple of small dollops of yogurt. See diagram below to judge how much filling you should have and how to roll your spring roll.

Repeat until you’ve made all the spring rolls. Arrange on plate and garnish with anything you like. I used a bit of the extra meat filling, Enoki mushrooms and a little yogurt.