Vegan Mofo #22 Isa’s Fresh Mango Summer Rolls...

Vegan Mofo #22 Isa’s Fresh Mango Summer Rolls

The Book - Vegan With A Vengeance
The Author - Isa Chandra Moskowitz
The Recipe - Fresh Mango Summer Rolls
Page - 84
Difficulty - Easy
Duration - Roughly 30 minutes

Since I was little I have loved Asian and Asian fusion food. Thai, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian you name it I love it. One of my favorite appetizer dishes has always been spring rolls, summer rolls or egg rolls. Each region has a different twist on this popular dish and I love them all. Though as much as I love these perfect little rolls I’d never tried making them myself until I got a copy of Isa’s ‘Vegan with a Vengeance’ and found this recipe.

I love this recipe because it’s such a wonderfully creative and delicious take on your usual summer roll. I am definitely the kind of person who likes to ‘jazz things up in the kitchen’ and as much as I love ‘traditional’ rolls I always find it refreshing when someone takes a few steps more towards originality. I’ll say that at first I wasn’t sure how mango and peanuts would taste wrapped up in here, but I should have known there’d be no reason to worry. These Summer rolls are amazing, and so refreshing.

The combination of fresh mango, rice noodles, cilantro, peanuts and bean sprouts is magic, and they’re surprisingly really easy to make. I don’t know why I went all those years feeling so intimidated by the prospect of making my own rolls from scratch. I make sushi from scratch for Buddha’s sake, and that’s a heck of a lot harder! There is basically no cooking in this recipe which is great! The only thing that needs to be cooked is the rice noodles and cooked is a generous word. You boil water and let them soak for 10 minutes how easy is that? Rice paper wrappers are even easier. You soak them in cold water till they’re pliable - about 30 seconds - and then you lay them on a flat clean surface, fill them and roll them. The water dries and the rice paper sticks to itself. Easy-peasy! You do however need to use a delicate hand otherwise the thin rice paper will tear, but even then it’s easy to kind of ‘glue’ your roll back together.

There are only two things I did differently. 1) I added a bit of shredded carrot and sliced green onions to the rolls along with the listed ingredients. Simply because I love green onions in everything and I had an excess of carrots that needed using. 2) I didn’t make Isa’s Thai Dipping Sauce that accompanies the recipe because I was in the mood for Almond sauce and I have a good personal recipe that I enjoy using. My husband isn’t a fan of almond or peanut sauces and so he slathered his rolls in a combination of garlic soy sauce and agave as well as a generous dollop of Thai Kitchen’s Sweet Thai Chili Sauce.

These rolls are really great and super easy to whip up for a party or as an appetizer. However the recipe does make quite a few so you may even want to consider eating them as a light lunch or dinner along with a nice salad. Which is what we did. They’re plenty filling, trust me!

PS: In retrospect I see I should have taken a picture of the inside of one of the rolls, but we were just in such a hurry to eat it never happened. Woops!