Skip to main content

Baked egg rolls

This recipe is modified from one I found on SparkRecipes forever ago.  These are a good use for whatever veggies you've got around - cabbage and carrots are the key ingredients, but you can add in pretty much whatever else you'd like.  (People tell me they're good with chopped mushrooms.)

Ingredients:

2 T extra virgin olive oil 
16 oz. shredded veggies - cabbage and carrot mix 
4 green onions, chopped 
1 small can water chestnuts, drained and chopped
1 1/2 cup bean sprouts
1 T ground ginger
1 T garlic powder 
2 T fish sauce 
2 T soy sauce  
1 T cornstarch 
20 egg roll wrappers
The Process:

Preheat oven to 400 F.

In a wok or large pan, heat olive oil.  Combine all ingredients except cornstarch and egg roll wrappers and stir-fry for about 2 minutes (until cabbage is wilted).

Mix cornstarch with 1 T cold water and add to wok.  Stir for about a minute, until sauce thickens.

After cooking, strain ingredients in a colander.  (You might also want to let the mixture cool, to make it easier to work with.  This will make the egg rolls a little crispier.  But if you're in a rush, you can work with it while it's still hot.)

Spray a cookie sheet with cooking spray. Place 1/4 cup of the mixture on the middle of an eggroll wrapper, turned like a diamond.

Fold the bottom corner up, over the filling. Fold in the two sides, then roll upwards. Put a dab of water on the corner to help it stick. Place on the pan seam down.

Repeat until you run out of the mixture, about 20 rolls. Eggrolls can be close, but not touching. Spray the tops with cooking spray and bake for 15 minutes, until golden brown. Serve with sweet & sour sauce or spicy mustard.  (Or both.  Both is good.)

Pro Tips:

If you've never bought egg roll wrappers, you will probably find them in the produce section of your local grocery store.  Look for the area where dressings and wraps and pre-cooked packaged beans are located.  (I found this extremely weird at first.)

Wrapping egg rolls is a bit of a pain at first.  Stick with it.  I promise that by the end of the recipe, they won't be as weird and lumpy.  My first batch was a hot mess.

Have you got garlic scapes around, say from a CSA?  Chop them up finely and add them to the cooking mix.  Take out or reduce the garlic powder.  You won't be sorry.

If you are comparing my recipe to the one on SparkRecipes, you'll notice that I have made 2 big changes: I make my egg rolls vegetarian, and I also took out the wine and increased the spices.  Do it.  I promise, they're better my way.  However, you could swap out the water chestnuts for shrimp, crab, chicken, whatever you'd like.

These really are delicious left over.  You can heat them up in the oven or for less than a minute in the microwave.  Or you can eat them cold.  I often wrap them up in packs of two and pack them for lunch.

Comments

Popular Posts

Chickpea Tofu

This one is sort of like a polenta, but seems to be firmer - and, of course, it uses chickpeas.  We've modified our version from Jennifer Schmidt's . The Ingredients: 1 cup chickpea flour 1 tsp salt at least 1/4 spice (we used ground ginger) 3 cups water (divided) Cooking spray or a neutral oil. The Process: Grease a pan or baking dish with the neutral oil.  An 8x8 is about right, but you can go smaller for thicker pieces or larger for thinner ones. Put 1 1/2 cups water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. While your water is getting to its boil, combine chickpea flour, salt, and spice in a bowl.  Mix in 1 1/2 cups water and whisk until smooth. Reduce heat on the saucepan to medium-high.  Add in the chickpea and water mixture, stirring constantly.  Continue stirring until the mixture thickens.  (Schmidt claims this will take 8 minutes.  It took more like 15.  Also, if you stop stirring, your tofu mix will bubble and spit at you....

It's not that I always want to cook...

Confession: I love cooking, but I don't always want to cook when I get home at the end of the day.  I don't get people who claim they do.  Believe me when I say that I too come home tired, annoyed, and/or aggravated, and I am as tempted as the next person (if not more) to cry "screw it!" and hop on GrubHub. I was having just such a day today - not that anything bad or annoying occurred, but it was hot, and it's summer, and I just wasn't feeling it.  Karen and I had gone out to do a few errands, and as we drove home, it seemed like every restaurant was taunting us. I could smell Mexican food, and something else delicious, as we made our way homeward through increasingly annoying traffic.  But I knew that there was a fridge of CSA vegetables awaiting us, and something had to be done with them before the next batch arrives on Saturday. So, grumbling, I made my way to said fridge, staring for a bit.  We've started to have lots of "scraps" of ve...

Treats for the whole family

The past several weeks when we picked up our CSA veggies, two curious kittens have wanted to know what's in the big green bag.  So today, we made an extra stop at the market - to visit Piggyback Treats , a company that works to "treat sustainably" by making treats and toys from rescued material.  They work with farms to use human-grade meat from things we don't eat - liver and heart and fish skin, among other bits - and prepare things safe for pets. After learning about the company and chatting with the vendor, we thought we might give it a try - or, rather, that Freddie and Xander, our two feline family members, might like to give it a try.  So we bought an ounce of tongue jerky and put it to the test. I should note first that everyone was very curious about this bag.  Very, very curious. After extracting Xander's head from the goodie bag, we were able to get it out and open up the package.  If you thought everyone was excited before, ...