Chinglish cooking lesson number 3. The best spring rolls in the world.

 

I am sorting through my photos from my trip and I will write some more posts about my time in China. It seems the blogspot site is still not working properly, so I will upload the pictures using html, but it takes forever.

Twice I was invited to Zheng Pin’s parents home for a meal. In China when you get married you don’t take on your husbands name, you keep your own. Zheng Pin is Alex’s wife, he has a different family name. But when they have their children they will take on the fathers name, so the fathers family name can be traced through the generations.

Okay back to the meal. I’ve had some pretty ghastly meals at times when visiting Chinese folks, but generally the meals are good. Entertaining a foreigner comes high on the local scale of status events and usually rice is not served, but special and more expensive foods are prepared.

Zheng Pins mother is a good cook. As an aside I must also say that she keeps a sparsely furnished home, enough but nothing extra, and as clean as any house you will find anywhere in the world. Her spring rolls are to die for. They are stuffed full, juicy, tasty, golden brown, hot, and just fabulous. I am going to put some pictures up but please excuse the bowl, I had already had several other lots of food in the same bowl.

The whole spring roll...above.

The inside. The majority of the filling is the fine glass noodles.


The ingredients seem to be the following, in no particular order or quantity. I’m going to have a few attempts and see what happens. I have found the spring roll wraps in the frozen section of the supermarket.

Fine clear noodles, not rice noodles, maybe what we call glass noodles. This was the bulk of the filling.

Finely grated carrot
Finely chopped cabbage
Finely chopped greens, maybe spinach, but very finely chopped
Finely chopped peanuts
She also had some tiny dried pink fish, maybe not available in the west
Finely chopped dark mushrooms
Finely chopped pork

I guess salt, pepper and some msg, and maybe some flavouring, although I asked it was hard to translate some of this stuff. I’m sure you could add other things to suit your taste.

This was all mixed thoroughly. They don’t use food processors, it is all done by hand, so is rather a long process getting it all so finely cut up, but I think a good processor or vitamiser would chop the pork mushrooms and greens up well. (Alex’s father even beats the eggs with chopsticks, takes ages). I think the pork and noodles were precooked before adding the other things, then wrapped and sealed before deep frying. There would be a few trial runs needed to get the mixture just right. She used the same mixture in her dumplings too, and they were delicious.

The mixture before it is cooked.

Some of the meal, soup, prawn things, pork, budweisser beer.

Zheng Pins mother, a good cook.

I have to say that eating real Chinese food is nothing like the stuff we get in Chinese restaurants in the west, which seems to be modified to suit our western tastebuds. The real stuff is good quality ingredients, fresh from the market that morning, stir fried in a wok, and for my money, is as healthy a meal as you can get.