CEiMB: Soft Asian Summer Rolls & Zucchini Rollups

I've loved spending time in the kitchen for as long as I can remember. I can't remember a time when I didn't like to look at recipes and I didn't want to be in the kitchen making a mess. That said, cooking & making meals was never an everyday thing for me until I moved to Washington. My sister and I lived in the cutest little house with the nicest kitchen for three years and I can only think of maybe 5 or 6 (and that's being very generous) occasions that I really cooked in that kitchen. The great irony is that I waited to live in a house with a ramshackle kitchen to really start cooking dinner every night. When A and I lived together we lived almost exclusively on take away from restaurants, Central Market, and Whole Foods. Of course, our tastes are pretty different, but one of the things we both loved were the summer rolls at Whole Foods. They're sort of an anomaly. You can get them from the ready made section of the Whole Foods at Kirby and West Alabama if you're in Houston, but I've never seen them at any other WF (including my local store here in DC). My friend L says that the "original" WF in Austin used to make them, but they stopped and she is so so upset! I eventually figured out how to make them myself, but I haven't done it since I moved to DC, and I was really happy to have an excuse to eat some summer rolls at home this week. 

This recipe seems very similar to most summer roll recipes except that I think some of them call for cilantro? I used chicken rather than shrimp because that's my preference. I'm so tired of buying basil only to use it once and then find it brown and withered in my fridge 3 weeks later. It really isn't warm enough for basil to thrive yet, but I bought and planted some boxwood basil (it looks like boxwood!) against my better judgement a couple of weeks ago. It was too cute and I couldn't resist. I'm hoping it will hang on until it gets warm enough but I did cut a few sprigs for these summer rolls. My mint, against all snowy, freezing cold odds, revived itself from nothing and is thriving on my deck right now. For those of you who think mint is totally strange in this roll, give it a shot, I think the combination of the mint and the basil is outstanding. 

I made the dipping sauce that the recipe calls for, and it's very light and tasty. The version that I used to get at WF comes with peanut sauce. I have a really deep affection for peanut sauce. It might not be my favorite condiment, but then again it just might be my favorite condiment. I.love.peanut.sauce. So, I made the satay sauce that accompanies the spicy chicken saté (the recipe is conveniently located on the pages just before the summer roll recipe) that we made in August (which, I swear I made and photographed but I guess I forgot to blog about it. SO YUMMY!). Both of the dipping sauces were delicious with these rolls. I really, really enjoyed this week's pick, and thank you, Teresa, for such a wonderful choice. You can visit her blog, A Blog About Food, if you'd like to learn more or you can get the recipe here.

Now I need to do a little rewind. Last week Liz, of My Table, Their Table chose Grilled Zucchini Roll-ups with Herbs and Cheese for her CEiMB pick. Sometime I'll tell you about my childhood experiences with zucchini, but for now we'll leave it that this recipe is outside of my comfort zone. I like zucchini best in bread. That said, I'm okay with zucchini as a vegetable and I adore goat cheese so I wanted to try this. It's a fun little bite and it actually wasn't as time consuming as I thought it would be. I don't have a grill so I just seared the zucchini in a skillet. The only issue I had was just one of personal taste:  I hate ice-cold cooked vegetables. There's just something about the resulting smooth texture that my mind reads as slime, slime, and more slime and it gets my gag reflex going. So, I popped these back in the oven at about 300 degrees for 10 minutes or so to warm them up, and that seemed to work out just fine. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed these little zucchini rolls, and I know I'll make them again.  If you'd like the recipe, you can see it here.