Minh’s Vietnamese Pork and Shrimp Egg Rolls

I appreciate everyone’s help yesterday with my knitted slippers dilemma. I shall overcome the problem and make the slippers work. Once done, I’ll let you know how it worked out.

Today I want to share a cooking project I enjoyed working on with some friends. My friend Minh is Vietnamese; she generously offered to teach a group of us how to make her family’s pork and shrimp egg rolls. Janel offered to host this event at her house and helped Minh translate the recipe to English for us.

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First thing is to wash your hands really well. Actually, I took this picture during our preparations and thought it was really nice so I just want to show it to you.

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Janel had tables everywhere because there were so many of us crowding her house. In this picture, Margie (on left) and Dena (her daughter on the right) are working with the egg roll wraps. Both of them are also members of my UFO crafting group. They’re a riot and make me laugh a lot.

We made two versions—pork and shrimp which was quite considerate of Minh since I’m allergic to the shrimp component. Everything was carefully segregated so I didn’t fall over dead from contact.

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Once the egg rolls were ready, it was time to cook them in the fryers we all brought. Living in Tucson means you can do lots of activities outside, so we lined up our electric fryers on Janel’s back porch.

© June Scroggin, All Rights Reserved. (I don't know why Blogger is turning this photo sideways, but I give up trying to remedy the problem.)

Here are some of the egg rolls frying their little selves. Minh taught us a trick for this; you add a teeny bit of vinegar to the hot oil and it keeps the oil from boiling over when you put in the egg rolls. Another trick was to stand the egg rolls up on one end around the pot as you can see in the photo.

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In this photo, Minh demonstrates how to prepare an egg roll for eating by wrapping it in lettuce with some mint leaves. Naturally we all had to eat a few egg rolls right away.

© June Scroggin, All Rights Reserved

We spent the whole day making hundreds of egg rolls. Every participant went home with large bags of each version. The shrimp egg rolls were pounced on by my shrimp-loving husband.

Minh kindly said I can share her recipe with you. Since it’s quite involved and too much to post, I’ve converted it to a PDF document you can access here or via my Tutorials section in the right-hand column.

This was a wonderful day learning a delicious recipe and cooking together with friends. Thank you, Minh and Janel!