Our family has a lot of favorite recipes. Some come from family members, passed down from one generation to another, others come from various cooking magazine subscriptions we’ve had over the years, and others come from the recommendations of friends. This one came from an unlikely source, Rachel’s best friend when she was in the first grade.
Rachel was a very picky eater when she was younger. The rest of us, loving Chinese food, could never understand why she didn’t like egg rolls. We didn’t mind, though… that was one less person to divide them between! She became very close with a girl whose family is from the Philippines. The girls would spend time at each other’s homes and one evening when Rachel returned from one of these visits, she raved about the egg rolls she had had for dinner. I couldn’t believe it! My picky eater, who hated egg rolls? This was one recipe I needed to write down. Since then, we have tweaked the recipe just a little to fit our tastes and it has been a favorite for the last twelve years.
I think the difference is the amount of meat to vegetables and the fact that they don’t have any cabbage in them. Rachel has never been a fan of cabbage!
Ingredients
2 1/2-3 lbs ground turkey
1 onion, chopped
5 cloves of garlic, minced
3 C green beans, slivered (I use a bag of frozen french style green beans)
2 C carrots, shredded (I use pre-shredded carrots found in the produce section)
salt and pepper to taste
2 packages of spring roll wrappers
olive or sunflower oil for frying
1 egg yolk
In a large skillet, fry ground turkey and onion together until turkey is no longer pink and onion is soft. Add garlic, green beans and carrots. Stir occasionally until beans and carrots have softened. Salt and pepper to taste.
Let mixture cool to make it easier to handle. Open spring roll wrappers and separate them. This will make the rolling time much faster. Place a small amount of meat filling in one corner of the wrapper.
Fold up the bottom corner first followed by each side and roll up gently.
Use egg yolk as the glue at the top.
I find it easiest to do all of the rolling before the pan frying starts.
Cover the bottom of a heavy skillet with oil. There will be a need to add more oil before all are browned. Let each roll brown on one side and then rotate to brown all four sides. Let them drain a little on a bed of paper towels.
One note about the wrappers… I have found that the egg roll wrappers from the grocery store are not as tasty as spring roll wrappers are. They seem a little soft and airy. We much prefer the crispier wrappers and find them at Asian markets or international food stores. If you can’t find them, the ones from the grocery will do.
We like to eat them with sweet chili sauce but they’re excellent with sweet and sour or hot Chinese mustard too. I hope you enjoy them as much as we do!
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