Fried Spring Rolls

Fried Spring Rolls

Our visit to Singapore is approaching. With it I always do experience mixed feelings. Of course I am happy and excited, but I also know that I will be very sad because once you set foot on the island, you know that your days there are numbered. And leaving is hard.

After more than 12 years away, a foreign hubby and 3 quite foreign kids later, you would expect me to have made my home away from home - for good. I probably have, except for the occasional return home in the mind, me wandering like a spirit in the parents' HDB flat, opening drawers, touching things...

For I have left quite a bit of my past life behind when I left the island more than a decade ago to do my Post-Grad in Paris. My books, letters from penpals, piano certificates, postcards, photo albums, clothes...My parents have left my things more or less the way I've left them and even me when I return home, I would rarely touch them. I can't turn back the clock and I cannot take back the bit of me that refuses to leave deciding instead to stay behind.

That is my current state of mind and it doesn't help that the weather has finally turned cold and my annual winter blues are setting in. On Saturday as such I had a sudden desire to make something from home and finding a pack of made-in-Singapore frozen spring roll skins in the Chinese shop here, decided to make some Fried Spring Rolls. The Hub started to complain that they wouldn't be good for our diet and that gave me an opportunity to snap at him, "Don't eat any of them, go chew on a leaf!"

The spring rolls from back home have a particular taste to them. I thought about it for a while and decided that it came from the soy sauces, sesame oil etc and am glad to say that I wasn't far, they did taste quite like the ones I remember eating in the Tim Sum restaurants back home. Though the next time I'll try to make them without meat and prawns and see if they'll still taste the same. The vegetables I used this time round included carrots, bean sprouts, zucchini, red bell pepper, shallots, mushrooms, green beans, chinese cabbage...whatever I could get my hands on in other words.

Meanwhile, the guy who was on a diet made his own sauce while waiting for the spring rolls to be fried and ate them up before you could say "Diet".