Fresh Vietnamese Spring Rolls

I’d been wanting to make these for the looooongest time, and I finally made my way to the Asian grocery store to get some ingredients that I couldn’t find anywhere else. I’m glad I did, because they were fast, easy, and oh so good. You can fill them with different ingredients, but here’s what I chose…

Ingredients:

• Rice wrapper rounds (banh trang)
• Rice vermicelli (super thin noodles) -I ended up buying green bean vermicelli and it worked well
• Chicken strips (marinated in BBQ sauce, soy sauce, black pepper, and lime juice)
• Mint
• Cilantro
• Basil
• Red leaf lettuce
• Bean Sprouts
• Mango

These were seriously easy to make:

Step 1: Marinate Chicken

A lot of people make these rolls with shrimp, but I decided to do BBQ-ish chicken. I marinated a few chicken tenderloins in BBQ sauce, soy sauce, black pepper, and lime juice.

Step 2: Cook the Chicken

I love this grill. Fast and easy is how I roll.

Step 3: Prepare the fillings

A lot of people julienne carrots and cucumber, but I couldn’t be bothered with that. I chose to use red leaf lettuce, mint, cilantro, and basil. I ripped them into slightly smaller pieces and piled them on my cutting board. I also bought a small bag of bean sprouts (which I forgot about until about half of the rolls were made).

You’ll also need to soak the vermicelli (super thin rice or bean noodles) in hot water for about 10 minutes, or until softened.

Here are all of our fillings (except the mango- oops), ready to get all wrapped up. Mmmmm…

Step 4: Soften the Rice Paper

You can use a big bowl of hot water, or quickly run it under hot water from the sink, like I did. I was worried it would break or stick to itself, but it’s pretty sturdy stuff.

Step 5: Put Fillings in Wrappers

After softening the rice paper, set it on a plate and start adding the fillings.

I made a few rolls with mango chunks instead of chicken and those were my favorites. I could do without the chicken and be perfectly content. Tim liked the chicken ones better- he’s such a carnivore.

All the pictures of me adding the greens were blurry thanks to low light, unsteady hands, and growling bellies. Don’t be upset.

Step 6: Roll it on up

Fold over the sides…

Then roll it up real nice and tight…

Viola!

Tasty fresh spring rolls that we ate with super hot vietnamese chili sauce (coincidentally what we had in our fridge)

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