Mint cha gio, all your green leftovers inside Spring rolls

Veggies to use or lose, combined to an envy of nems as we say in France. I mean cha gio, the Vietnamese Spring rolls, that are a French favorite deli food. These rolls can be made in great style with many ingredients, deep fried and all. It’s a quick and casual version.

The filling is very simple : Minced lettuce, mint, garlic, onion and ginger. Salt, pepper. Mashed white beans. Fold in rice paper. Let a few hours to allow flavors to mix.

They could be eaten raw… if you don’t mind raw garlic and onion that are a bit strong. I pan-fried them.

The sauce : pounded garlic, brown sugar, a pinch of salt, chili and plenty of rice vinegar.

One side dish is a quick tsukemono (pickles) : grated daikon radish, broccoli leaves, cut sakura leaves, a little salt. Let 20 minutes then squeeze away excess liquid. A second dish is a “stalk” stir-fry in the space of pan next to the rolls. The menu :

Soba miso soup and grilled aji fish

Classic Japanese food, in a not so classic meal presentation. There would be rice normally. That doesn’t matter, as long as it’s colorful and good.

Shioyaki aji. The aji are Japanese jack mackerels. They look like sardines but you can recognize them by the “zip” on their side. I’ve simply cleaned and emptied them them, sprinkled salt and grilled a few minutes under the broiler.

Some vitamins to fight the Winter plagues. The greens are sanchu Korean lettuce. Then some pickled young ginger.

Plated.

Blanched fresh soba with nanohana (rape greens). On that, a classic miso soup. The red bits are a dry togarashi chili.

Disappearing champuru

So many items and you no longer see the main dish… It’s really a big Okinawan champuru (see here) under that.

It’s tofu and egg scramble. I flavored it with some bits of salmon skin that I stir-fried, ginger and negi leeks, sea salt.

But you no longer see that base on the plate. Stirred in red cabbage, kabocha, goya, negi…

And lots of Romaine around around it.

That’s not finished : I added ten kasu (tempura crumbs) and chili powder.

A good lunch full of veggie and crunchiness…

Salad bar

Too.hot.to.cook.

Zucchini and konnyaku noodles in shira-ae sauce.

shira-ae recipe

2 minutes in the mortar.

Isn’t that creamy ?

Natto and kimchi.

Greens. And purples.

Moonrise avocado

Photos at night under the neon are really ugly. That’s great material to play with. Let’s go retro.
Retro avocado. They are no longer the same as when I was a kid. That was new, exotic and I guess expensive. But they were green. The rind was green. The flavor was deeper, greener. The flesh was greener and when we’d make guacamole, it would turn very green very quickly… no matter how much lemon we added.
The new varieties they sell now are probably less fragile. But they are so white, so fat. That’s more like margarine.

So let’s use the green bits of the leaves power up the guacamole.

Deep green.

To go with it, a new version of the pattzuki bean patties cooked in the hot-sand grid of the waffle maker. They contain a few peppercorns of green sansho, so you really crunch into deep green.

You never have too many greens on you plate.