This morning I opted to skip the EAS Crafts morning and head to Accent Mandarin for a Chinese Cooking class on Spring Rolls! I love food. One of the best things of living in England was the ability to eat my way through cities and countries. I'm a little more cautious with my food choices here in China as I've heard so many horror stories and I have nightmares about my dog Brewer ending up on my dinner plate. Bill's quite adventurous and has been traveling here for a while now so snake, chicken feet, and all those "weird" foods don't seem to phase him. I stick to chicken, tofu, pork, and veggies. We both love spring rolls in the US and I've never made them from scratch at home before so I figured I should give it a go! Plus I really would like to learn some Chinese cooking techniques!
Spring Rolls are considered Chinese Dim Sum and are typically eaten in the spring. Spring here is during the Chinese New Year festival, so we were told we may not be able to buy spring roll wrappers anymore this year until next year.
We made 2 kinds of spring rolls today... salty and sweet.
The "salty" variety included: ji cai(it's a green vegetable that was chopped very finely, it reminded me of chopped spinach but it tastes nothing like it), dried tofu, bamboo shoots, pork, ginger and scallions.
It was quite fun because we actually had to mince the pork by hand. There was only 1 other student besides myself so we each got a piece and chopped it up finely, then chopped some more, added the ginger and onions. Then we added some seasonings to the pork and let it marinade while we chopped the veggies, stir fried them up and then added everything together.
Once they were assembled we fried them in the wok. The very important part here was to heat the oil up to smoking then turn it off for a minute or two, then turn it back onto to a low/medium heat so that the rolls just turn golden yellow/brown.
The sweet variety that we made was with red bean paste and black sesame seeds. Black sesame seeds here are typically mixed with sugar and are very sweet. They can actually come as small discs and served as dessert, these were ground up a little bit and we mixed them with the red bean paste. Picture refried beans but red colored and sweet tasting!
This is what the red bean paste looks like.
All in all it was a really fun time and now I know how to make spring rolls at home. I even got to bring a half dozen home for Bill to try!
This morning I opted to skip the EAS Crafts morning and head to Accent Mandarin for a Chinese Cooking class on Spring Rolls! I love food. One of the best things of living in England was the ability to eat my way through cities and countries. I'm a little more cautious with my food choices here in China as I've heard so many horror stories and I have nightmares about my dog Brewer ending up on my dinner plate. Bill's quite adventurous and has been traveling here for a while now so snake, chicken feet, and all those "weird" foods don't seem to phase him. I stick to chicken, tofu, pork, and veggies. We both love spring rolls in the US and I've never made them from scratch at home before so I figured I should give it a go! Plus I really would like to learn some Chinese cooking techniques!
Spring Rolls are considered Chinese Dim Sum and are typically eaten in the spring. Spring here is during the Chinese New Year festival, so we were told we may not be able to buy spring roll wrappers anymore this year until next year.
We made 2 kinds of spring rolls today... salty and sweet.
The "salty" variety included: ji cai(it's a green vegetable that was chopped very finely, it reminded me of chopped spinach but it tastes nothing like it), dried tofu, bamboo shoots, pork, ginger and scallions.
It was quite fun because we actually had to mince the pork by hand. There was only 1 other student besides myself so we each got a piece and chopped it up finely, then chopped some more, added the ginger and onions. Then we added some seasonings to the pork and let it marinade while we chopped the veggies, stir fried them up and then added everything together.
Once they were assembled we fried them in the wok. The very important part here was to heat the oil up to smoking then turn it off for a minute or two, then turn it back onto to a low/medium heat so that the rolls just turn golden yellow/brown.
The sweet variety that we made was with red bean paste and black sesame seeds. Black sesame seeds here are typically mixed with sugar and are very sweet. They can actually come as small discs and served as dessert, these were ground up a little bit and we mixed them with the red bean paste. Picture refried beans but red colored and sweet tasting!
This is what the red bean paste looks like.
All in all it was a really fun time and now I know how to make spring rolls at home. I even got to bring a half dozen home for Bill to try!
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