Easy Vietnamese Spring Roll recipe

Hi everyone, hope you’re doing well and your weather is warming up to the peak of Spring. We’re back, cooking in our home kitchen again and it feels nice to be making food that isn’t for a shoot. We’ve had a fulfilling four weeks of back to back shoots and working with some of the coolest and creative people in advertising, but it’s always nice to be able to wind down and cook to eat, rather than for the camera. And best of all, we don’t always have a sink full of dirty dishes! That’s part of our days on shoots, tending to towering piles of dirty dishes.

Now with a few days of rest before we’re back to shooting Fall campaigns, the first thing that we missed eating at home were fresh Vietnamese spring rolls. We just can’t get enough of these fresh spring rolls. We live on spring rolls.

As we were gathering ingredients for our simple lunch, we realized that we never had a chance to share with you Charles Phan’s fantastic cookbook. Have you looked at his gorgeous book yet? It’s an incredible work of art. The book really transports you back to Vietnam, where Charles grew up and shares his food stories from street food to his humble home cooking. We also had a blast filming and producing the . When we flipped the pages, one of the first recipes that crossed our fingers was Charles’ pork and shrimp spring rolls.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect and inspired because we haven’t made our pork and shrimp spring rolls in a while. This is one of those perfect lunches and dinners that is so easy to make, that can feed a hungry family and is both healthy and satisfying. As the weather warms up, we tend to stray away from heavy lunches because our bodies start calling out to take a nap.

Some cooks find it intimidating to work with spring roll wrappers, but once you understand how to work with them, it’s really easier than you think. The key is making sure you don’t over soak your wrappers and having all your ingredients all prepped and ready to go. Mis en place organization is important and once you have all your vegetables and fillings out and ready, rolling and eating the spring rolls is so much for fun. We wrote a tutorial on how we . Hopefully it’ll be of help to you when you venture into this dish.

Enjoy,

diane and todd

Our previous can be found here .

For these pork and shrimp spring rolls, start your roll first….

then lay the sliced shrimp, cut side up

finished roll! For open ended rolls, just fold the wrapper in half & let the lettuce peek out the ends

Yield: Serves 3-4

Total Time: 45 min

In his cookbook Vietnamese Home Cooking, Charles Phan has a great story behind these spring rolls and how his Mother has a very unique twist by adding a smear of homemade mayonnaise to moisten the wrapper. We suggest you get the book to understand how she does all this, as well as how he makes his full version of the rolls with his peanut dip. The recipe we're sharing today is our own recipe that we serve with our hoisin peanut dip.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• about 1/2 pound (8 oz) boneless pork loin or shoulder
• 1 (8-10 oz) package dried rice vermicelli noodles or "rice sticks", cooked to package instructions.
• 1 small head of lettuce
• 1 medium cucumber, cut into thin strips
• fresh herbs: mint, asian basil. Vietnamese coriander, Vietnamese perilla or cilantro
• about 12 (8-inch) rice paper wrappers or rice paper spring roll wrappers

For Hoisin Peanut dip:

• 1/4 cup hoisin ( If hoisin dip is too thick, add water to thin out the dip)
• 2 heaping tablespoons peanut butter, almond butter or cashew butter.
• 1 teaspoon rice vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil