flailing in my kitchen v3.1
How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Back in March, I had attended a wedding, and one of the appetizers were these cute little veggie spring rolls. I thought they were delicious, and it made me want to make some spring rolls of my own.
I remember telling my aunt I made some chen nem生ណែម - fresh spring roll, and she said something like
leu jiah chen nem汝食生ណែម - you eat fresh spring roll?! in the winter?!
And I had to tell her, it's spring! It literally became spring that week!
Well, maybe it was technically spring, but it was actually still so cold for the next month and a half, so I guess Soy Go細姑 - small aunt was right to call me out on that.
When my family makes spring rolls, we typically add both pork and shrimp, but I was a bit tired right after that wedding trip, and I didn't want to make things too gang kou艱苦 - difficult for myself, so I opted to just include shrimp. (Yes, shrimp is the easier of the two!)
But after I finished all my shrimp, I still had more spring roll wrappers left, and I didn't want to make even more shrimp spring rolls, so I decided that it was time to cook some pork.
I often will go the easy route and just boil and slice some pork belly, but Soy Go has a special pork recipe that involves toasted rice. Remember when I had spring rolls every day for pre-dinner snack? Well, I did learn how to make the pork! When Soy Go first explained it to me, she made it sound like it was sooo easy.
It's not. Spring rolls themselves are already a lot of work, and this pork makes it a whole day affair for me. And I was actually feeling kind of sick recently and I did not want to make cooking more of a hassle. Buuut I guess my desire to eat this pork took over, and because of that, now YOU can learn how to make this pork too!
Anyway, I grabbed about a 3 lb chunk of pork butt from Aldi and I got started. In order to get more flavor into the pork, I cut it up into large chunks and then I salted the chunks for at least a few hours before I cooked them. But I'm still not sure if this extra step makes that much of a difference.
Next I needed to make the toasted rice. I would say that if you have sticky/sweet rice, definitely use it! But most of the time, I only have a big bag of Jasmine rice so that's what I used. For this amount of pork, I scooped out about 1/4 of a rice cooker cup, washed that, and then cha炒 - stir fry on a dry pan on medium heat.
Then I toasted it until it was chiah chiah sek赤赤色 - golden brown! Once that cooled a little, I threw it into my Nutribullet and blitzed it up into little pieces.
And then it was time to cook the pork. I boiled 2.5 quarts of water and added a healthy pinch of salt and sugar. I ended up using 1 tbsp of salt and 1.5 tbsp of sugar, but honestly I think it could have used more of both. I plopped in the pieces of pork and let it boil for 5 minutes before turning the heat down to medium low, and then I let it simmer for 30-45 minutes, occasionally skimming out the impurities that float to the top.
To see if the pork is done cooking, you can take a chopstick and poke at it and see if blood comes out. That's what Soy Go told me, but I just kind of cut into it to see if it looks cooked. If it's still a bit tough, you can also cook it for longer. Once it was at my desired tenderness, I sliced it up into bite sized pieces.
And finally, I seasoned it with the toasted rice, salt, sugar, and goi jeng雞精 - chicken bouillon to taste.
I like to put these in my spring rolls! The toasted rice bits make it so fun to eat. My aunt also told me to save the water that the pork cooked in, to bu beung煲飯 - cook rice in it or something. I decided to make some soup with it. I made this Napa cabbage and tofu soup recipe, but I used my pork broth instead of chicken broth. It was very good!
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!
Man I have been so busy with work and various trips that I have not been doing much cooking. And I can feel it. So much eating out and eating junk food. But it is now February 2023 and I am finally feeling a little less busy.
I don't have a nice theme to tie these all together, but here are a few meals that I cooked this past week:
I had four pieces of rice paper left in my cabinet, and while I don't have a picture of the spring rolls I made, I do have a picture of the salad I made with all of the same ingredients. I cooked some pork butt, and tossed it in toasted rice, which is something that my aunt taught me how to do. One day I'll post a recipe for that pork.
One of my friends has really been in the mood for "savory bread" lately, but I was definitely not prepared to make bread. She looked up a recipe to see if she could find something easy, and we decided to make this savory quick bread with cheese and olives, which is bread in the same sense that banana bread or zucchini bread is bread. Basically, it's cake in the shape of a bread loaf.
We added a bunch of extra things that the recipe didn't even call for, like green onion and sun dried tomatoes. I think we went a little overboard. This recipe also called for four eggs, which is way too many eggs, especially considering how expensive eggs are nowadays. But what we didn't add was salt. Bad decision. You always need salt. The recipe simply said to "salt to taste", but how am I supposed to salt to taste when there's raw flour and eggs?! I can't taste that!
I was a little worried I was going to hate this because I don't like egg-y things, but it turned out to be...okay. Not great. Would not make this recipe again. I'd probably try a different bread recipe though.
And finally, here's my breakfast from this morning that I spent way too much effort on. It was worth it though. My family gave me some beef jerky, and I just love the combination of beef jerky and white rice. I also added a marinated soft boiled egg and some cucumber slices to trick myself into thinking this is a well balanced meal.
So, I made spring rolls about a month ago. Two months ago? Who knows at this point. I had this whole blog post planned out in my head about how I was making these fancy lunches, but now it's many weeks later and I don't remember any of it. But I'm looking at these food pics that I took, and I'm like, man, I really want some spring rolls.
Why did I wait so long to make this post? Well, I've had ideas brewing in my head about revamping the layout, and I didn't want to make another post until that was done. Turns out that web design is hard, and I still have things I want to change. But I think I need a break from tinkering this layout.
I don't know why I thought making spring rolls for lunch on a weekday was a good idea. Spring rolls are so much work! And then I decided to make this even crazier by seeing if there was a way I could wrap these so the shrimps were on the outside to make it all aesthetic.
Okay, I know, it's not about how it looks. It's about how it tastes. And spring rolls are delicious. But I think I actually prefer pork over shrimp. I mean, I prefer having both pork AND shrimp, but if I have to choose one, I think I go with pork.
But it doesn't matter if I add pork, shrimp, chicken, whatever. Spring rolls are always good. And even though it is freezing cold outside, I could really go for some spring rolls right now.
It's hard for me to have two active projects at once. I started my Teochew site in 2018, then took a break from it and started my food blog in 2019. Now that I'm working on the Teochew site again, it's hard for me to find the energy to devote to the food blog. But I did take a few pictures, so I wanted to share some of the things I cooked (or helped cook) over the past couple of weeks.
Bao wasn't the only exciting food I helped make while I visited my grandma's. We made fresh spring rolls every day for "pre-dinner snack". It seemed a little excessive, but it was delicious.
I need to figure out how my aunt prepared that pork. It was SO GOOD. On the first day, I just ate three spring rolls, but by the last day, I was eating five, which is more than I what I eat for a meal sometimes. It's okay. It's healthy.
When I got back, I made some strawberry pizza. (I actually made it twice!) My sister and I made this pizza way back when I first started the food blog, and it was one of my favorite recipes that we tried. I think it tasted good, but not as amazing as when I had it with my sister. On my second attempt, I added goat cheese, and I think that was a good addition.
Every other week, I have a "co-working day" with my friend, and after work we pick a dish to cook together. This week we made chicken tikka masala and a roasted eggplant salad. It was all very good, but my friend ended up replacing 1.5 teaspoons of chili powder with 2 teaspoons of ground red pepper in the tikka masala, and it was way too much heat for me. I usually only stick to 1/4 teaspoon if I add any hot pepper 🥵
Finally, my boyfriend requested some poke, and while I didn't have any sashimi grade fish on me, I did have half a pound of frozen shrimp. I cooked that and grabbed whatever poke appropriate ingredients I had for toppings. Poke is great because apart from the fish, I really don't have to plan for it at all. I always have poke ingredients in my kitchen.
