Saturday, September 20, 2008

China and Egg Rolls

As part of her curriculum this year, Shelley is studying China. Part of this involved cooking some kind of Chinese dish. Her selection was egg rolls. Thus last night we had egg rolls. It’s a difficult balance to maintain in providing the right amount of advice and demonstrations in cooking tips and techniques. I think it’s more difficult to watch someone else cooking than it is to do it myself.

In any case, Shelley got it done. The recipe called for pork and shrimp, but since we don’t use those ingredients, I suggested substituting some of the meatless burgers and adding a bit of soy sauce and fish sauce to restore a bit of the flavors that the amino acids from the protein sources would normally have contributed to the egg rolls. The results were quite good. We used some store-bought sweet and sour sauce for dipping. After looking at the ingredients, I quickly realized it is something that is rather easily reproducible: sugar, water, vinegar, ketchup, soy sauce, corn starch… oh, and some artificial colorings.

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