Spring rolls with sweet chili and cilantro sauce

This is the second week that Adam went to a friend's house too play poker. He met some guys at the games he plays at. I'm glad he's making friends. They just play with chips, not money. He offered to bring an appetizer this week. He asked me if I had a ookbook so I laughed at him and asked to specify. He wanted one that was snack or appetizer mostly. Actually, I don't have any of those but Adam got one from his brother 2 Christmases ago. So he spent some time leafing through that and decided on making spring rolls.

Actually, the spring rolls in the book are made with seafood meat, red onions, carrots, fresh ginger and mint in rice paper. But he doesn't like seafood, onions, is allergic to mint and after we tasted the fresh ginger, we both vetoed that ingredient. He couldn't find the rice paper so he used spring roll wrappers which I think are the same things. We rolled carrots, red bell peppers, asparagus and crumbled pork and cilantro.


The sauce however, we followed exactly, except we duobled it.

1 cup rice vinegar
3/4 cup superfine sugar
1 tsp salt
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 thumb-sized red chili peppers, deseeded and finely chopped
3 tbsp finely chopped cilantro

In amedium-sized saucepan, heat the vinegar and sugar and bring to a boil. Simmer for about 3 minutes, until a syrup forms. Pour into a bowl and leave to cool. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

I actually had to cover my nose and mouth with a kleenex while cooking the vinegar mixture because the vinegar fumes weresteaming into the air and it would burn the inside of my nose. The whole house smelled (and probably still smells) like it.

It doesn't sound like the process would take too much time but between cooking the meat, julienning or finely chopping all the veggies, and making the sauce (which took longer than the 3 minutes it states) and wrapping everything in the wrappers it took us about 2 1/2 hous to do.

They were really good. The sauce didn't taste strongly of vinegar like we were afraid of. It wasn't too spicy either. I got to keep a few for dinner. :o) I'm sure the guys at the poker party are thrilled they have a gourmet cook coming now.