Vietnamese summer rolls

When Nicole was here, I made her take a look at one of my cookbooks, and when she the summer rolls, she knew what she wanted to make for dinner. This summer rolls contain lettuce noodles, cucumbers and carrots, with a hint of cilantro and mint, all rolled up in rice wrappers. I'm sure this would also be great with some steamed shrimp (I do have a delicious recipe for steamed veggies and shrimp). It was nice and warm out and was definitely a perfect spring/summer meal. We paired it with plenty of Oberon and sesame noodles.



Ingredients:

• rice paper wrappers
• extra firm tofu, cut into long rectilinear pieces
• bean sprouts
• carrots, cut into matchsticks
• cucumbers, cut into long rectilinear pieces
• rice noodles
• leafy lettuce (we used red leaf)
• cilantro leaves
• mint leaves
• hoison sauce
• soy sauce
• sesame oil
• ground ginger

We first rehydrated the rice noddles following the directions on the package and cut up all of the veggies. We mixed a small amount of hoison sauce with a dash of sesame oil, plenty of soy sauce, and a few pinches of ginger. This served as both our dipping sauce and marinade for the tofu. We spooned a small amount of dipping sauce onto the sliced tofu. We next rehydrated the dry rice paper wrappers by placing them in warm water for two minutes until they were pliable (one at a time though). We moistened a towel and laid it on the counter as our workstation for wrapping.



Wrapping...we placed the rehydrated rice wrapper on the moistened towel. We took a piece of lettuce and made sure to remove any of the sharp and pointy parts (as we found that they will rip the rice paper). We put the lettuce on the rice wrapper followed by a healthy portion of rice noodles, cucumbers, carrots, tofu, a few leaves of cilantro and a leaf of mint. The mint can be quite strong, so we split the leaves of mint in half (lengthwise) and equally distributed the two halves in the roll. We then wrapped it up tightly (we rolled half of it up, then folded in the sides, and finished rolling)

To serve, we sliced them diagonally with the a side of dipping sauce.