Joanne's Yummy Egg Rolls

Rodney wanted egg rolls and suggested we make them "together", as in he'd help me.  Like a sucker, I went for it even though my experience in egg roll making always made me feel inadequate. I could never roll them fast enough or tight enough. Thus I made it a point to be relaxed when making these and if they turned out badly, I wasn't going to kick myself over it.

Joanne's Yummy Egg Rolls

adapted from Week of Menus

1/4 lb of ground pork
2 1/4 tsp of ginger
2 1/4 tsp of garlic
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1/4 head of cabbage, shredded
1 carrots, julienne
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
1/4 bunch of scallions, chopped
Salt
Pepper

1 bunch of mung bean thread noodles (aka vermicelli)
eggrolls wrappers
cups of vegetable oil

egg

Place noodles in a large mixing bowl.


In a large skillet, add 2 teaspoons of oil, ginger, garlic and pork. Working quickly, completely cook the pork pork and add the oyster sauce.


Pour the pork mixture and liquid over the noodles.


In the same skillet, over medium heat, add another 2 teaspoons of oil; add cabbage to the oil in batches if necessary and sprinkle each batch with a pinch of salt and pepper. Stir fry until the cabbage is wilted, but not soggy.


Add cabbage to the pork and noodles. Cover the bowl of hot ingredients with a lid.


Continue batch frying the cabbage (if necessary), carrots and onions with salt and oil; add to the bowl of cooked ingredients until all vegetables are fried, covering after each addition.


Add scallions to the bowl of cooked vegetables and slowly begin mixing the ingredients.


If the noodles are soft enough (mine most definitely were not), take kitchen shears and cut them into smaller pieces. If the noodles are NOT soft enough and there doesn't seem to be enough liquid or heat to make the noodles soft enough, slowly add boiling water in 1/4 cup increments, mixing as you go, in order to produce the soft noodles and a uniform filling. Cut noodles once they are pliable.

I added 3/4 cups of boiling water incrementally before I was finally able to cut the noodles with kitchen scissors into 1-2" pieces.

In a skillet, heat up adequate cups of oil over medium heat.

Meanwhile, beat egg in a small bowl. Begin rolling egg rolls by placing 1/4 cup of filling in one corner of the wrapper. Pull the corner up and tightly push it against the filling.

Roll the wrapper up until you are just shy of the middle of the wrapper. Fold over one side then the other, much like a burrito. Keep rolling as tightly as possible without allowing cabbage or carrots to poke through the wrapper. Seal the end with a dab of beaten egg.

Roll and seal tightly. While waiting for them to be fried, lay them seam side down.

Check the oil occasionally -- it is ready when you point a wooden chopstick straight down into the bottom of the oil and tiny bubbles rise rapidly to the surface.


Place eggrolls into the oil, taking care not to crowd them. Since the filling is completely cooked, the goal is to simply obtain an even golden-brown skin.

Remove browned egg rolls to a wire rack to drain and cool.

Add another batch of egg rolls to the hot oil, taking care not to burn yourself.

While the second batch is frying, carefully bite into a slightly cooled, but still quite hot, egg roll from the first fried batch.

Stand around in the kitchen, eating egg rolls and frying additional batches of fresh egg rolls until you run out of egg rolls to fry.


Hot. Delicious. I used too many bean threads! It turns out that I used a quarter of the package when only an eighth, 1 bunch, was called for; my bad. Still, very good. Much better than I'd expected. Next time, I'll use the appropriate amount of bean threads and maybe up the quantity of pork. I like pork.

Cost:

• ground pork: $0.61
• ginger: $0.15
• oyster sauce: $0.12
• cabbage: $0.42
• carrots: $0.40
• onion: $0.20
• bean thread noodles: $0.50
• egg roll wrappers: $0.75

Total: $3.15 for a total of 10 egg rolls with more filling left over. That makes each egg roll less than $0.32!

And FYI, Rodney did help.  He rolled the majority of the egg rolls.

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