Vietnamese Salad Wraps, An Easy Vegan Dish
Howdy folks! I haven’t been keeping up with this blog enough and I do apologize. I’m still training hard, still experimenting with my diet, still not happy with one part of my body. A few days ago I was just done. I was ready to give up. That was my carb-depleted body talking and after having some carbs and a few pieces of chocolate I felt right with the world again. Lesson learned is I function better with carbs in my diet! But today I want to share a recipe and cooking video with you! Yay!
I was super thrilled to receive my copy of Allyson Kramer’s new book Great Gluten-Free Vegan Eats Around the World! Being a world traveler I crave ethnic food that uses unique spices or foods I’ve never heard of or used before in my cooking. When thumbing through the book there were a TON of things I wanted to make, but since I’m contest dieting right now my stomach was drawn to the Bulgogi-Style Tofu and the Vietnamese Salad Wraps (something I’ve made many times and is the perfect contest dieting food).
As I said in my quote for the book:
“You need not be gluten-free or vegan to explore the new flavors found in Allyson’s new book, GGFVE Around The World. Filled with beautiful color photographs and unique recipes from Africa to South America, your tastebuds will be taken on a culinary adventure without even leaving the house. Enjoy the ride!”
I made some variations to the recipe in the book, which I show below. Use whatever veggies (and fruit) you have on hand for your rolls. You really can’t go wrong with any of your favorite foods for the filling of spring rolls.
Vietnamese Salad Wraps
For the Salad Wraps:
1/2 zucchini, julienned
1 carrot, julienned
1 apple, thinly sliced
Fresh mint
For the Sauce:
4 tablespoons (60 ml) gluten-free soy sauce or tamari
2 tablespoons (28 ml) mirin
1 1/2 teaspoons Chinese five-spice powder
2 heaping tablespoons (32 g) creamy peanut butter
To make the salad wraps:
Line a pie pan with about 1 inch of water. Run 1 sheet rice paper wrap under water just briefly to get entirely wet (it will soften more once removed while you roll it up) and place on a clean, flat surface.
In the middle of the circular paper, about an inch up from the bottom, place a small amount of julienned carrot, apple and zucchini with a some mint leaves and then wrap up: first the bottom, then the sides, and finally, roll up to the top. The papers will get very sticky if you wait too long to roll them, so work quickly when wrapping and wet only 1 paper at a time. Repeat until all papers are used.
For the sauce:
Whisk together until smooth and creamy.
RecipeNote
Rice paper wraps are easy to locate in Asian grocery stores. They are typically stocked alongside the rice noodles or nori sheets.
Another thing you can do with this recipe is use collard greens instead of the rice paper wrap. I show how to do that in the video above! This is one of my favorite quick meals because it just takes a few minutes to blanch the collard greens and I always have precut veggies in the fridge for snacking.
Make healthful plant-happy meals does NOT have to be difficult or time consuming! As I say in this post, just keep things simple! If you have any questions do let me know in the comments!
And be sure to check out the other blogs, recipes, and giveaways that are part of Allyson’s blog tour!
So, in your contest diet, were you trying to do a high-protein (or only protein) diet but keep it vegan? I’m intrigued to know how you did that. I’ve given up worrying about my carb-fat-protein balance because on a vegan diet (or 99.9% vegan – I eat eggs once every few weeks) I just get lots of carbs and that’s all I can do (mind you, most of the carbs come from green veggies, so I’m not even worrying about those as “carbs”).
I had cut my starchy carbs to just once a day for about a week as an experiment. So I didn’t eliminate them completely, but realize that I do better with them twice a day. I pretty much eat quinoa and sweet potato as my carb source. Sometimes I do polenta porridge for breakfast so my carbs are still generally low compared to most people (not including veggies and fruit which I eat a ton of!!). You gotta figure out what works best for you by experimenting. Everything is an experiment for me.
I don’t eat soy products,and I never know what to replace tofu with any suggestion? Thanks
For this recipe in-particular you can just leave tofu out. But for protein sources other than soy there’s seitan, beans, lentils, hemp seeds, nuts, and seeds, whole grains. If you are an athlete I highly recommend having a protein shake. PlantFusion is soy-free and a few other brands are too!