Veggie Rolls

Otherwise known as vegetable lumpia. That tasty, kind of healthy, crispy merienda.

Serve with sukang maasim (I use the Datu Puti brand). You'll know it by the onions, garlic and peppers floating around at the bottom of the vinegar bottle.

1 pack spring roll wrapper
1 lb ground pork, browned and then drained of fat
julienne the following vegetables to the amount you like:
- carrots
- green beans
- water chestnuts
half a small onion, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
- one small sweet potato chopped finely and fried
a handful of bean sprouts

Saute veggies together in the following order: onions, green beans, garlic, carrots, water chestnuts, bean sprouts, sweet potatoes. Add ground pork, season with soy sauce and pepper, and then wrap about a small scoopful of this deliciousness into a spring roll wrap and fold diagonally until you get a rough cylindrical shape going on. Seal the end with a little bit of water. Deep fry these babies in a pan and drain onto a paper towel before serving.

Ignore the oil, taste the flavor and just tell yourself that after your fifth one, you'll stop.

Zuppa Toscana

Nothing better on a cold, cloudy day than a large bowl of steaming hot soup. This is a tweaked recipe, tried and true from none other than Olive Garden's repository of goodies: Zuppa Toscana. Love this the first time I tried it during an all you can eat Soup Salad and Breadsticks meal. My sisters and I can get full from just the breadsticks and soups, sans salad as we're not salad people. We can pack away at least three bowlfuls each in one sitting, liberally sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan.

Finding something my sisters and I all like can be rare. So in those rare occasions, I like to recreate them at home and as with most homemade creations, they turn out much better than the restaurant versions. I love to tweak recipes and I'm a slap and dash cooker, too lazy to measure most things, adjusting according to taste memory. Original recipe calls for kale, but having younger sisters with less adventurous tastes, they prefer spinach to kale.

Zuppa Toscana

- 1 lb. sweet/hot Italian sausage combination
- as many red potatoes as you like
- 1 medium onion
- 3 cloves garlic minced
- 1/3lb bacon
- water
- 1/2 pint heavy cream
- chicken bouillon
- bag baby spinach (rinsed) or bunch of kale (cut off stems and just use the leafy greens)

Cook the bacon in a heavy soup pot, put aside bacon. Peel the Italian sausages and roll into bite sized pieces, brown in the bacon grease. Halve each of the potatoes and slice thinly. Add potatoes to pot, flavor with salt, pepper and hot red pepper flakes.  Add onions and garlic until onions are translucent. Add water to deglaze pot, add bouillon, and cream. Simmer until potatoes are tender and cooked through. Add spinach. Serve with chopped bacon and a liberal sprinkling of freshly grated parmigiano reggiano. Eat with a side of sliced baguettes fresh from your local bakery.