Vegetarian Popiah

This shall be the Best vegetarian food of my life!

Preparation for this Hokkien dish of Popiah 薄饼 or Chinese Spring Roll, requires a whole day of manual chopping, slicing and shredding all the vegetables with the big kitchen knife or the mandoline.

It's a back-breaking job for a housewife, and we only understand it now after helping out in the kitchen. But mum used to do all this by herself! But not now or ever as her hands have start to ache or grow numb under excessive applied pressure.

Sis was helping mom the whole Sunday doing the above. And i being not around, hate to miss the action and had told my mum in advance to leave something for me to do when i come back.

So this is what i did, spending near 4hrs of the evening shredding a little basket full of French beans with the mandoline. Yay, one stalk at a time. This is really time consuming but i actually enjoyed the process.

And Hurray! All was worthwhile when the dish was presented to us at dinner today. What go into the cooked vegetable mix are julienne carrots, cabbages, French beans, turnips and strips of fried bean curbs.

Then, it has to be combined with the right amount of sweet flour sauce, chilli paste, minced garlic, Chinese lettuces, bean sprouts, coriander leaves and topping of ground peanut wrapped snugly inside a thin plain flour dough skin (bought at $18/kg) to form the popiah roll.

And there's nothing better than biting into a whole uncut popiah roll and having the juices drip down your fingers giving you a lovely combination of sweet, salty, spicy and crunchy sensations!

I had 6 rolls tonight, stopping only after making sure that there's still enough set aside for tomorrow's dinner, haha...

None of the popiah version from local food stalls or restaurants comes close to home cooked ones. Most being heavy on taste and with its machine-aided vegetables processing work gave your bite a totally different texture.

The last time we have our home-cooked popiah was during the Chinese New Year, 人日 of 2006. Where the Chinese believe 7 kinds of vegetable was to be consume that day to mark a new beginning.

And as Sis is flying off to China for a 3mths training this April; maybe when she's back we can do this again. Popiah has a traditional significance of reunion and was meant to be cooked and eaten together as a family.