Mystery Ingredient Monday--Mint

Yes, it is Tuesday.  Be nice.

Alex and I are kind of Iron Chef and Chopped junkies, so you can imagine how excited I was when I learned about the Mystery Ingredient Monday link-up being hosted by A Clan's Tale, Housewifespice, and The Bazin Chronicles.

This week's mystery ingredient was mint.  I love mint.  I was tempted to head to the store to buy some mint chocolate chip ice cream (and maybe even splurge on Haagen-Dazs because it was my birthday week) and call it good, but I figured I should probably do something that required more than popping off a lid and grabbing a spoon.  My next thought was mojitos, because if anything is better than mint + chocolate it is mint + rum.  But I was feeling like a bit of an over achiever and decided I needed to step out of my comfort zone and find a savory mint dish (and I'm so glad I did, because Tasha's mojitos look way better than mine would have been).


Which brings me to this recipe for spring rolls.  Ever since a fabulous trip to Vietnam during college I have been thoroughly in love with Vietnamese cuisine.  It was a three week senior capstone seminar for my international studies degree, so I call it my "study abroad experience," but the "study" pretty much consisted of eating amazing food, seeing the amazing countryside, and drinking amazing fruity cocktails (and my first mojito, appropriately enough)

serious international scholars, clearly

brave enough to try once, but probably never again

So, spring rolls!  We followed the recipe loosely.  As in, I didn't measure anything except for the sauce, and I substituted chicken for the shrimp.

phone pictures--I didn't want to over-impress with
the amazing quality of my cooking and
photography...

I almost paid $1 extra for a smaller bottle of a
different brand just to avoid the picture of the squid

spring roll wraps/rice paper available in the Asian aisel
at my parents' regular grocery store--no specialty store
shopping necessary. win!

The recipe for the sauce is simply fish sauce seasoned with green onions, lime juice, and crushed red pepper.  I found that to be waaaay too salty, and Alex found it to be too fishy (I couldn't smell/taste the fish, possibly because of my epic allergies).  I diluted the sauce with ~ 1/4 cup water and added more lime, and that helped quite a bit.  Alex couldn't get over the fishiness, but I think you could make a similar sauce with soy sauce.  The addition of some sesame oil and/or rice wine vinegar would probably be good as well.

I skipped out on the lettuce inside the wraps, but I think it would have been a nice addition.  Next time I will include it, and maybe some bean sprouts as well.

delicious fillings

My first three or four attempts at softening the rice paper resulted in absolutely unusable sticky clumps, and I was starting to contemplate giving up and throwing the ingredients together for a stir-fry instead.  Then I decided to try following the instructions on the back of the rice paper package instead of the directions from the recipe.  Success!  I don't know how many varieties of Vietnamese spring roll wraps there are out there, but these definitely worked better when dipped in lukewarm water until they started to soften (and just use your fingers--unless you are much more talented with tongs than I am), then rested on a wet towel for 30 seconds or so, then filled and wrapped.

I was absolutely thrilled with the end result.  They came much closer to living up to my memory of real Vietnamese spring rolls than I had expected.  With a little bit of tweaking (especially in the sauce) they will be even better next time--and there will most certainly be a next time.

Alex wasn't quite sold on the texture of the rice paper wrap and eating them cold, so we went ahead and fried half of them.  That was a successful experiment as well.

I couldn't quite let this challenge go without a cocktail.  Still riding high from the success of trying something completely new, I decided to try a mint julep for the first time.  I haven't read The Great Gatsby since high school, and I haven't seen the movie, but I'm pretty sure they were drinking these all the time in that book, and that's where I heard about them.  And "julep" is just a cool word.  The drink was surprisingly simple (I don't know what I expected)--just bourbon, mint, and sugar.

a very happy birthday cocktail

It was delicious.  Next time I'll plan ahead and try one of the several recipes I found that involve infusing some bourbon with mint first or making a mint simple syrup for a stronger mint flavor.

Head on over to A Clan's Tale to check out the rest of the minty magic!