Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls

I invited an American friend to sleep over on the weekend, and for dinner decided to prepare Vietnamese spring rolls. I'm not even sure if Vietnamese people eat it the way we did; it's probably a very Koreanized version, but I'm Korean, what can I say? Anyway, it was the first proper major meal that we prepared since we moved in last month, both for guests or for ourselves, and so my mom and I made a huge deal out of it. And naturally, due to the magnitude of the occasion (for me at least) I had decided to document it.

I'm definitely not good enough of a cook to be posting any recipes, any these rolls are, in my opinion, one of the easiest foods to make. The ingredients to prepare are whatever you want to put in your rolls, so in my case: ground beef, eggs, mushrooms, peppers, onion, carrot, sprouts, and 맛살 (matsal, fake crab meat, I have no idea what you call it in English). 

I chopped up the vegetables into nice even sizes, sauted the onion, parboiled the mushrooms, and laid them out on a long plate. So pretty and colorful :D

 

Then I whisked and fried my eggs, and cooked the ground beef after seasoning it a bit with garlic, salt, and pepper. 

 

Then at the last minute, my mom decided to invite my brother over for dinner as well. I was making rolls for three, not four, and since we were worried that wouldn't be enough food, we hastily made some rice balls. We didn't have time to cook rice from scratch, so we microwaved some hetbahn (one of the greatest Korean inventions) and threw in a couple packets of Babirang. And voila!

And er... that was pretty much it. We lay out the rice paper, as well as the peanut and chili sauce purchased at the supermarket earlier that day. Eating it is super easy as well:

1. Prepare a bowl of hot water.
2. Dip the rice paper evenly into the hot water.
3. Lay out the paper on your plate.
4. Take whatever ingredients you want to eat.
5. Wrap it up (from all four corners), dip in sauce, devour.

I had an amazing time preparing dinner and eating it too. Once again, I'm pretty sure this isn't authentic Vietnamese, but that's what it's known as it in Korea and I love it regardless of what it's called. It's a healthy and nutritious meal that is easy to prepare if you have all the ingredients and aren't too lazy to do some chopping and a bit of simple cooking.

I'm thinking of making burgers next weekend, so hopefully another yummy post will be updated soon!