Butternut Squash and Pumpkin Seed Rice Paper Rolls

A rather long name for a pretty simple dish. I had never made anything with those spring rolls skins before, so yet another road untraveled in the cooking department. I'm always excited to be doing something new with cooking.

Overall impressions

Difficulty: Pretty darn easy, but a little delicate when rolling the skins up

Price: Reasonable. There aren't many ingredients.

Taste: Good. We weren't blown away, but it was light and tasty, especially the dipping sauce.

Cleanup: Easy.

With this dish I really saved on time by buying a bag of precut, precooked butternut squash, which I steamed for about 5 minutes. The book says the prep time is about an hour and 15 minutes. It was definitely less for me mostly because of bypassing the whole squash prep steps. However, I will say that a fresh squash probably would have had much more flavor. The frozen cubes seemed pretty bland to me. We've had better ones before, so it could have just been a bad bag.

Anyway, aside from that, before assembling the rolls, all there was to do was the cook some noodles and whip up the sauce.

I couldn't actually find the rice paper rolls so I bought my only option, which were some rolls made out of tapioca flour. I followed the instructions the same way (by dipping them in warm water) and they worked out perfectly.

I'm not one who enjoys delicate operations that require patience, but there's no avoiding it with the rolling step. But it really wasn't as delicate as I thought and it wasn't messy at all. I probably could have done a better job rolling them up as a couple of them opened up at the sides when eating, but all in all it wasn't a problem. Stickly noodles don't tend to slide out of sticky rolls.

For the two of us, it was a light yet filling meal. And healthy, too. Not one you want to have on a day you're craving comfort foods, so keep that in mind.

We thought of an alternative way of stuffing these next time, with little cubes of fried tofu, the noodles, ground peanut and maybe some green onion. And we'd definitley use the same dipping sauce.

This recipe is on page 59 in Veganomicon.