Week 5, Day 3: Spring rolls & A-ha!

Well, I learned a few things today. I was about to start making an Indian curry dish for dinner when my daughter came over to urge me to make something different ("yuck! curry..yuck!") so I looked around our pantry and came up with spring rolls. I've been avoiding making these, or any Asian food because we can't use soy sauce or peanuts, which are apparently two of my favorite ingredients now that I can't eat them.

So, I spent the following hour and a half making spring rolls - well, searching the internet for soy-free sauces and making spring rolls intermittently, and trying different variations of canola oil, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, salt and coconut milk to come up with a sauce my daughter would eat. She sampled and we came up with one she liked (all ingredients minus coconut milk). I poured the sauce into a ziplock bag, then added lettuce, cabbage, cucumber, carrots, and cooked rice noodles into the bag to marinate. I then added ingredients to a rice spring roll wrapper, added a little avocado and I thought they tasted pretty darn good. I made some for my daughter minus cabbage and lettuce at her request. She ate one roll, then told me she was full. And also, didn't like them. Meanwhile, I was cooking a separate soy sauce noodles and veggie dish for my 2 year old, which he ultimately pushed away and didn't want to eat.

I would have taken a picture of the spring rolls, but I was so hungry I ate them before I had a chance to get a picture. However, here's a picture of the remaining ingredients I made when I was cleaning up and made one final large spring roll for tomorrow:



My goal for next week is to be more organized about what I'll be cooking ahead of time. Also, I'm learning that as much as I like to let my daughter voice her opinions, she doesn't like a good amount of what I cook, regardless of whether she suggested the dish or not, so I should just make whatever I want. It's taking me a little while to actually get that it's okay for me to just prepare a healthy dinner of my choice, taking their preferences into account, and say, "Eat it if you're hungry. Otherwise, go play."

Here's a few links I found while making spring rolls today. I found some yummy recipes I'd like to try out at some point:

Raw Vegan Spinach Manicotti

Chia Pudding

Soy-free soy sauce recipe

Book of Yum (GF, Soy-free Vegetarian recipes)

Vegweb Spring Rolls