It's already time for the Household 6 cooking club challenge! Months are flying by and pretty soon the kids will be in school again! Bittersweet. We've been busy. With birthdays (two so far this month, one at the end of this month and one next month! We also had my sister in law and her family visiting from Uganda. It was so fun and such a blessing for the girls to play with their cousins! Summer giveaways are in full swing, one each week so far! Check out the latest one, and keep checking back for new ones! This week is the Dropper Stopper giveaway, open until 7/22/11. Click, enter and share!
This is my monthly challenge post for HH6. What/who is HH6? Glad you asked! HH6 is-
Military spouse food bloggers taking on a culinary challenge/theme every month. Email saraplicious@yahoo.com to join and receive the monthly challenge/theme and blog roll.
You can find HH6 on Facebook, HERE. I missed last months cooking challenge. It was a crazy month. Wait. This month is crazy too. Sigh. I had a cool idea for last months challenge too. I have it on my to do list. This months cooking challenge
Since it's getting hotter and hotter as we head into full summer, the challenge is to cook a meal without using heat - oven, stove, microwave, anything. Bonus points if your meal isn't a salad!
As soon as this idea was posted I kinda knew what I wanted to do. So I started tonight's dinner. And realized I didn't have the thinnest rice vermicelli there was to have. SIGH. Remember this part, it's kind of relevant. I wasn't about to make a grocery store run so I did without. I also used frozen cooked shrimp. Not sure if that was a no no. I hope not. DH says it's cheating, I say it isn't because I personally didn't cook them. I made Spring rolls, Som Tom/Papaya Salad- which is a salad, but there you go, and a dipping sauce.
Give Peas A Chance Spring Rolls
Rice paper 10 sheets- I like a blend of rice and tapioca flours, the tapioca makes it more chewy to me.
1/2 cucumber peeled, seeded and sliced into thin strips
10 springs of cilantro
3-4 springs Holy basil or Italian in a pinch- remove the stems and discard them
2-3 carrots peeled and sliced very thinly- I used my julienne peeler
1/2 small red bell pepper sliced very thinly
20-30 pieces of frozen cooked shrimp depending on size (2-3 pieces per roll) thaw and drain
(You can use any vegetables/herbs you want, bean sprouts, mint, and more. You can also use tofu. Just press it to remove the excess water)
To assemble the rolls dip one sheet of rice paper in warm water for a few seconds. Place it flat on a plate to soften. Fill one side with vegetables, herbs, shrimp. Disperse ingredients evenly to make 10 spring rolls, more or less. Depending on how thick you make them. I even put Papaya salad in some of them, Piglet loved that. Roll them up like egg rolls and eat. See HERE for more instruction and my other Spring roll post.
On to my rant about not having the right vermicelli. See the roll pictured under this paragraph? It has vermicelli that I had to pout boiling water for and let sit for 2-3 minutes. The roll pictured up top has no vermicelli. If you have the tiny thin vermicelli you can soak in very hot tap water and it softens up nicely. The thicker? Not so much.
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| I put the basil and red pepper strip up higher so they would peek through the roll. |
Jeaow Som/ Dipping Sauce
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
3 or more Thai bird chilies (I'll use a a lot like 15)
1-2 tablespoons sugar
3-4 cloves of garlic
1/8 teaspoon salt
Pound the garlic, chilies, sugar and salt with a mortar and pestle. Add nam pla and lime juice to taste. That's about. You can also dissolve the sugar in some hot water, slice the garlic and chilies thinly and mix it all together.
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| Papaya Salad- with some carrot in there also. |
I did also consider gazpacho or another cold soup like with cucumber or melon but I don't know, we all loved dinner so, eh. Here are some other ideas I had floating around that I had done before.
Ceviche - I never blogged the recipe. Is ceviche a salad?
My all time favorite Sashimi. BEST. No cook meal EVER.
Of course for desserts there's all sorts of popsicles- here are some that I have blogged, use the search feature for more!
Honey Berry pops, these only count if you use store bought yogurt. You need heat to make yogurt.
Don't want an ice pop? How about Pie?
Check out the other HH6 bloggers
Darnit! You beat me to it :) Looks delicious!
ReplyDeletethanks!
DeleteThose spring rolls look awesome! I've GOT to do those!
ReplyDeletehave fun!! So good.
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