Kimchi spring rolls

January 7, 2025 12:09 AM

I often decide on a dish to make because of a single ingredient that I have that I want to use up. A few weeks ago, that ingredient was a bell pepper. I was looking at bell pepper recipes on Budget Bytes, and I had honestly made most of them before, but one of them seemed pretty different, kimchi spring rolls.

Now I make spring rolls all the time. And I think my spring rolls are pretty darn good, but sometimes it's nice to switch it up and try other fillings. The recipe is labeled as an appetizer. It's pretty light, and it's vegan. Of course I didn't actually make it vegan. I had a small amount of imitation crab left over from another dish, so I added that into the spring rolls. It was pretty good! The kimchi filling was interesting, in a good way. The only thing I didn't love was the dipping sauce, which I thought was way too salty, and I ended up adding extra agave into it to try and balance it out more.

I used up all the imitation crab in one meal, so when I had it again a couple of days later, it really was vegan! I told my aunt about my meal and she said "No meat?! Child, does it even taste good?" Yeah, I told her of course it tastes good and you don't need to eat meat during every meal.

I actually hadn't taken a single bite of my spring roll yet, but after eating one I thought "...this could use some meat" 😅

So more recently, I wanted to use up the rest of my kimchi and peanut butter, so I made another batch of that kimchi filling. And I also bought fresh shrimp from Aldi because this spring roll tastes better when it's got some protein. For a while, I avoided buying Aldi's fresh shrimp because I didn't fully trust it. I don't know why, because I always buy their fresh salmon, and I think it's great. When I finally did buy their shrimp, it turned out great!

As I opened the shrimp this time, I took a long hard stare at it and I also sniffed it really closely. It had a slight smell to it. I had bought some Aldi shrimp a couple of weeks ago and I waited a couple of days to cook it, but I ended up trashing it because it smelled off. This was kind of similar. But the smell wasn't as strong and I only noticed it if I put my face real close to it. I decided to just risk it and cook it. After I cooked it, I took a bite of one. It was alright. Not amazing, but it tasted like shrimp.

I don't think I fully trusted this shrimp though. I kept inspecting it some more and sniffing it. Inside of the spring roll, I barely noticed the shrimp and those tasted fine. But it was still bugging me too much, and after I ate three spring rolls with shrimp, I decided to take out my teriyaki chicken and put that in the fourth roll instead.

Anyway, that was a few days ago, and I feel fine and I never got a stomachache, so I guess that shrimp was perfectly fine. I made another batch of spring rolls yesterday, and I ate more of the shrimp. I even ate a little bit more today, but I ended up not finishing it all. I think I might be avoiding Aldi's fresh shrimp again.

Questionable shrimp aside, these spring rolls were pretty good!