Young & Hungry

In Chicago on business, I once ordered in the city’s famous deep dish pizza, greedily eating it in the bed of my hotel room, sauce dripping down my chin. A thick and crisp cornmeal crust was swollen and bursting with nearly four pounds of toppings….on one single pizza! My pizza, while also a deep dish style, is decidedly less ostentatious, though still delicious and perfect as a party appetizer or for a home cooked dinner. Christine and I have been making pizza in this style for years, utilizing an herbed focaccia bread mix as the foundation. It can be topped in a multitude of ways; here, I took advantage of the end of summer’s tart green tomatoes, pairing them with a mild goat cheese and sweet caramelized onions. Delish!

 

Mangia!

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Dylan Thomas wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night”; I have the same advice for the crafting of Vietnamese Summer Rolls.  There will inevitably come a point when you will realize that you are in way over your head, that these cousins of the more familiar spring rolls are not, in fact, as simple as they first appeared, that you do not have the patience or dexterity required to work with such delicate ingredients.  My friends…you must fight the urge to quit!  I tried the recipe first for a reason, so I can relay my findings, and so that you can learn from them and have a head start on what I admit to be a trying process.

 

Summer rolls became an addiction of mine while I was working in Hawaii and making daily jaunts down Fort Street, dodging the radom showers, and sampling the rolls at each and every restaurant.  There were tofu rolls, shrimp rolls, tuna salad rolls, veggie rolls, pork rolls; you name it, someone on that street made it.  In retrospect, I think that the making of these rolls might be better left to the specialists.  In the same way that true Italians make better biscotti, I’m pretty sure that the Vietnamese make better rolls.  That said, if you have the time and patience, these are pretty good.

 
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