Veggie Spring roll

cuckoo879

Coming from a Traditional chinese family making ordinary dieting pretty difficult. Luckily, the ancient chinese culture has already figured this out for me and I simply modify the recipe a bit to make it into a low sodium (hopefully, we asian like to eat a lot of sodium) option.

serves about 3 people (2 spring roll per person)

6 large cabbage leaves
one cup of sliced carrots(or cucumber, you can also put both)
6 tbsp rice vinegar (adjust the vinegar to your liking, rice vinegar are slightly sweet in nature, but at 0 calories so no guilty points)
pinch of salt
5 ginger root slice
1 star anise (asian spice, should be able to find this at the asian aisle)
4-6 hot chili pepper
1/4 cup of sugar
1 tsp olive oil

**you can add any stuffing you like in the spring roll, in this case I used carrots. You can also use cucumber, ear fungus (traditional chinese mushroom), or ground meat.

1. bring 1.5 cups of water to an boil, add the sugar and vinegar. Slowly dissolve the sugar on medium heat. Turn off the heat once all the ingredient has dissolved. Add a pinch of salt to adjust the taste.
2. After turned off the heat, add the dried red chili pepper to the pot, cut the sterm end and lightly tap on the side of the pepper to discard as many seeds as you can. Then cut the pepper into thin slices and drop them into the boiled sugar/vinegar mixture. Add the sliced ginger roots and star anise.
3. Set the pot aside for later use
4. start a new pot with boiling water, add a pinch of salt and about a tsp of olive oil.
5. prepare several cabbage leaves, you want the whole leaf, try not to break the leaves. You can cut off the root end of the leaf that'll make the leaf easier to wrap later on.
6. once the water started to boil, emerge the entire leaf in the boiling water.
7. boil the cabbage leaves until the leaves has become semi translucent. take the leaves out and emerge them into cold water
8. emerge the sliced carrots in the boiling water for about 3 minutes then drain the water. (You can also add cucumber, except you do not need to cook the cucumber)
9. prepare 6 long slice/peel of carrots (you can use the peeler for this) add a pinch of salt to those sliced carrots and set them aside. Let the water drain out of the carrot peels a bit.
10. Take a piece of cabbage leaf and set it flat, add a few of the sliced carrots to one end. Roll the cabbage like a spring roll.
12. Use the carrot peel to tie the cabbage roll in the middle for stabilization.
13. continue to those for the rest of the cabbage leaves.
14. place all the cabbage spring roll in a container, add the vinegar/sugar solution we made before. Be sure the completely emerge all the cabbage spring rolls in the solution.
15. Tightly seal the container and place it in a cool place for about 24 hours.
16. Enjoy your veggie spring roll!

**this dish is meant to pickle for awhile, so if after 24 hours it doesn't have the sweet/sour pickle taste, you can leave it in the fridge (or cool place outside) for a little longer.

ldrosophila

Yummy! Do you find that ancient chinese food is lower in salt? Probably has more veggies in it too.

cuckoo879

The original recipe calls for soy sauce, it replace it with a pinch of salt instead. But the taste does fad a bit