Believe it or not I still had a hunk of a cabbage sitting in my fridge from the first week of December, before I started this blog, before I got two whole cabbage heads when my neighbors gifted me with their CSA share.

I like cabbage, but there has been a lot of it. But I am a waste-not kind of a lady, and this was just a little bit left, I though for sure I would find something fun to do with it. I did a search through my files for "cabbage" and lo and behold... here was this recipe from Food & Wine that I'd not yet gotten around to making. It calls for exactly the right amount of cabbage. I love a roll. I buy rice papers in bulk. Let's do this.

Planning!

This was some seriously good luck, rediscovering this recipe, because I had a little bit of pork leftover from making this amazing meatloaf the day before; I would weigh that leftover pork, and if it was less than the 4oz called for (I knew it would be), I would add more shrimp to bring the whole mix back up to the correct weight.

Then I reread the recipe and realized that it asked for 6cm rice papers. I thought "that doesn't sound right" and checked my rice papers to discover that yes, mine are 22cm. No worries. Less rolling, and less time over the stove frying! Instead of 24 rolls, I'd end up with... less? Probably 8? Sounds good to me!

Here's the nutritional breakdown from Fitbit...

Groceries I had on hand...

• vegetable oil
• shallot
• cabbage
• sugar
• ground pork
• salt
• egg
• pepper
• rice papers

Groceries I had to buy...

• fish sauce (1 bottle @ $3.29)
• shrimp (1lb @ $9.99/lb)
• red-skinned potato (.36lb @ $1.29/lb = $.46)
• thai chile pepper (.03lb @ $4.69/lb = $.14)
• limes (2 @ 5 for $2.00 = $.80)

Total monies spent for the entire recipe: $14.68

Total monies spent for each of these 4 meals....

$3.67 per meal.

Cooking!

Rolling rice paper is actually pretty easy, so that wasn't the hard part. The hard part was actually stir-frying all of the filling properly. I wasn't sure where the directions were going with the fish sauce and the sugar when it just said "cook," so I decided it meant "cook down" because knowing how fragile rice paper is, and that this whole thing would be fried up in hot oil, they couldn't mean for me to leave extra liquid in the mix, and I was SO right... that fish sauce and sugar came together like a gorgeous meaty umami monster. I almost didn't make the rolls. Sometime down the road, I might just make this filling and eat it over rice. Sometime later down the road.

I did have a little bit of extra filling left after I'd made the eight rolls, so I made a tester roll that was less filling, more paper. I fried it first to make sure I knew what I was doing, and then I ate it with my two "portioned" rolls for dinner. Free calories? (Don't answer that!)

These rolls are amazing, but it's the dipping sauce that really takes them over the edge. The whole situation is crispy, meaty, fishy, sweet, sour, and spicy.