Astranoir

Last weekend I made lumpia. Lumpia is a deep-fried Filipino spring roll. I got ideas from what my Lolo (my mom’s dad) taught me, as well as from a book my Auntie Tellie and Uncle Al got me called The Little Lumpia Book by Gene Gonzalez.

Sunday, I spent about 5 hours chopping vegetables. I decided to include onion, carrot, cabbage, potato, water chestnut, bamboo shoot, green bean, bean sprout, celery and garlic.

I made nearly 2 batches worth of lumpia (about 175 lumpia altogether).

I only used a little over half an onion for all 2 batches. I think I matchsticked 5 medium-sized carrots.

I used slightly less than a full head of lettuce, and 5 small potatoes (I used red because that’s what I had, but I could easily have used russet potatoes or even jicama).

I used 1 can of water chestnuts, and about half a can of bamboo shoots (I’m not the biggest fan of canned bamboo shoots).

I included around half a pound of thinly sliced green beans (about 1cm thick, in discs the width of the bean), but only 1 stalk of celery. I added generous amounts of minced garlic before cooking. For some horrible reason, I couldn’t find fresh bean sprouts at the store. I had a can of them, but was skeptical about how canned bean sprouts would work. I drained them, and let them air dry for about a day. Cooked in with everything else, they weren’t too bad. I’d definitely recommend fresh bean sprouts, though!

Since I was cooking to share with my food club friends, I made these lumpia vegetarian-friendly. With the first batch I used ground Quorn as the protein (6 oz. or half a bag). I stir fried with the vegetables about a tablespoon of sesame seed oil; and salt, pepper and soy sauce to taste until the vegetables were tender, but still crisp.

I cooked the second batch the same way, using chopped pre-cooked shrimp instead of Quorn.

I took Monday off work (finishing off my vacation hours before they expired on my 2 year anniversary with the company)! Marisa helped me wrap lumpia for 3 hours before they were ready for freezing and frying.

We bought frozen spring roll wrappers from a local Asian market. I thawed them by keeping them in the refrigerator for 24 hours, then setting them out on the counter in the morning.

Below are the steps we followed for filling and wrapping lumpia:

First, lay a single wrapper flat. Then fill with about 2 teaspoons of filling, spreading lengthwise.

Fold the bottom up about 1/3 of the way. Tuck some of the excess around the filling.

Fold in each side.

Roll up once, then apply adhesive (we used water mixed with cornstarch, but you can use egg, or even plain water) to the top edges of the wrapper.

Finish rolling up the wrapper and smooth the edges so it sticks closed.

The 2 of us wrapped 175 lumpia in around 3 hours.

We bagged 125 of them for freezing.

And fried the rest for food club.

I fried the lumpia in canola oil using my kawali (Filipino wok) over medium-high electric heat.

We served the lumpia with suka (white vinegar, a small amount of salt and pepper, and crushed or minced garlic).

Prep pictures taken with Vignette for Android on my Samsung Captivate. Wrapping and frying pictures taken with Marisa’s iPhone 3GS and cropped by me using Gimp.

Last Saturday, Maggie, Marisa and I decided to make decorative yarn balls based off this tutorial.

First we chose our yarns and inflated balloons. We used the larger size suggested in the tutorial, as well as smaller water balloons so we could have varied sizes.

We took the time to enjoy ourselves with the balloons before properly starting the project.

We dipped the yarn in the water/glue mixture, and wrapped it around the balloons, then set them on parchment paper to dry (we let ours dry for nearly 48 hours before popping and removing the balloons).

The yarn balls looked like they were collapsing when we popped the balloons, and the balloons pulled inward. The yarn quickly sprung back into place, however, and turned out rather well.

All pictures for this post were taken with my Samsung Galaxy S Captivate, using the Vignette App.

I got to hang out with Maggie and Marisa a bit tonight, and took some snapshots of our shenanigans with Vignette, so I thought I’d share them. They recently got a new-in-box record player off Craigslist. It was playing records too quickly, so we opened it up, determined what was wrong, and fixed it! Also, Bosie hung out in a basket while we listened to Simon and Garfunkel. Fun times.