Summer Roll Salad, All the Flavor None of the Fuss

Oh, you tried to make Summer Rolls and they ended up lopsided, bursting open, and that's if you could even get them to roll at all? Not to worry! This Summer Roll Salad takes all those ingredients you love and turns them into a fuss-free salad. It even uses the same flavors from the dipping sauce for the rich, creamy Peanut Dressing and the rice paper sheets as "noodles!" Shall we?

Explore More

• Summer Roll Salad Recipe
• What Ingredients You Need for Summer Roll Salad
• What Kind of Rice Paper is Best for Summer Roll Salad?
• Instructions for How to Make Summer Roll Salad
• Pro Tips and Techniques for Summer Roll Salad
• Tools and Equipment

What Ingredients You Need for Summer Roll Salad

Summer Roll Salad ingredients:

• Rice paper, 10-12 inch diameter, 8 sheets
• Chicken, cooked and thinly sliced against grain, 2 breasts, or about 3 cups
• ½ head Romaine or green leaf lettuce shredded
• ¼ head purple cabbage shredded
• Cilantro, 1 cup leaves
• Mint, 1 cup leaves
• Thai basil, 1 cup leaves
• Green onion, 1 stalk, thin slice on bias
• Red bell pepper, 1 julienned
• Carrot, 1 large, finely julienned
• Persian cucumbers, 2
• Peanuts, ½ cup roasted, rough chopped

Peanut Dressing Ingredients:

• Peanut butter, ¼ cup (no salt, no sugar)
• Lime, 2 limes to make ¼ cup juice
• Vinegar, 2 tablespoons rice or apple cider
• 2 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 1 1-inch ginger, peeled and grated
• Sriracha hot sauce, 1 tablespoon plus more to taste
• Maple syrup, 1 teaspoon, plus more to taste
• Fish sauce, 1 tablespoon (or sub 1 teaspoon sea salt)
• water as needed for texture

This Summer Roll Salad also tastes great with the lighter, brighter, more lime-forward Fish Sauce Vinaigrette from the Chicken Cabbage Salad!

What Kind of Rice Paper is Best for Summer Roll Salad?

Rice paper, called bánh tráng, are thin sheets made of rice flour and water that come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes (yes! they're not all round), and even colors. Sometimes they include tapioca to make them sturdier and easier to roll. For this Summer Roll Salad, use whatever rice papers you have. If you are going to buy, get plain, round rice paper wrappers that are at least 22 cm/8½ inches in diameter. Slightly larger 10 inches will be easier for you to use later if you make rolls.

This is a popular brand that you can find in Asian grocery stores where they may have an entire aisle dedicated to spring roll wrappers, or online. Dishes that use rice paper wrappers are so popular now, I've found rice paper at Whole Foods and some bigger grocery stores.

Best Recipes that Use Rice Paper

If you already have rice noodles, go ahead and use them in place of the "rice paper noodle" hack! You will need about 8 ounces of rice noodles of any kind, whether round or flat, thin and narrow or thick and wide, dried or fresh.

For salads, I like the flat rice noodle shape usually used for pho called bánh phở, similar in shape to fettuccine or tagliatelle. They are available both fresh and dried. Rice noodles labeled for pad thai are also in this category.

• for thinner rice vermicelli, this well-known brand is available at Asian markets and online.
• This organic rice noodle is labeled as "pho," but the noodles are actually round, not flat.
• I use brown rice noodles when they are available, or like this.

Pro (Am) Tip: The flat-shaped rice noodles are easier to pick up with chopsticks, i.e. not as slippery!

How to Cut Chicken for Summer Roll Salad

Store-bought rotisserie chicken is your BEST FRIEND for this recipe. I almost always use chicken breast because that's what's leftover after eating the more delicious dark meat first ha! But using the dark meat is the salad will give you a LOT more flavor and a slightly different nutrition profile. For this salad, I like to slice chicken breast across the grain rather than shredding.

Additional Ingredients Notes, Substitutions, and Resources

Peanut butter. Use smooth peanut butter, preferably with no salt and no sugar added so you can add the salt and sweetness yourself. The brand I used in these photos is this organic one, preferably in a a glass jar.

Sriracha hot sauce. We all know the sriracha sauce that comes in the rooster bottle with the green top, but that is not the only one. I found a mostly organic sriracha at Whole Foods. You can also use sambal (coarse texture with seeds), or even chili crisp.

Fish sauce: This brand has been my favorite for years available at Whole Foods if you can't get to an Asian market, and this one I've tried recently and like, too!

Apple Cider Vinegar. This generic store brand of organic Apple Cider Vinegar is generally the most affordable where I shop. This is the well-known apple cider vineger brand that's available everywhere.

Rice Vinegar. I use this brand organic brown rice vinegar.

Maple Syrup. I use an organic maple syrup. You can substitute with other sweetener of choice.

Garlic, Ginger, and all other fresh herbs and produce from either the Santa Monica Farmers' Market on Wednesday, Mar Vista Farmers Market on Sunday, or Whole Foods Market when I can't find what I need at the farmers' market.

Instructions for How to Make Summer Roll Salad

The KEY to making this salad is slicing all the vegetables into long, thin shreds. The shreds will make them easier to chew and digest, grip onto the dressing better, and easier to pick up with chopsticks.

Prep Vegetables and Make Dressing

How to Make Rice Paper Noodles

Assemble the Summer Roll Salad

Pro Tips and Techniques for Summer Roll Salad

1. Sub in cooked shrimp or roasted tofu for the chicken!
2. Shred the lettuce and other vegetables as thin as possible. This will make for easier eating, especially with chopsticks. And what other utensil would you be using?!
3. Dress only the amount of salad you will serve and eat in one sitting. Leftover salad with dressing will be ok in the fridge for a day. After that, the dressed salad won't be bad, it will just get soggy and the noodles might start to disintegrate a little.
4. Use Fish Sauce Vinaigrette from the Chicken and Cabbage Salad as your dressing for a lighter, more umami vibe!

Tools and Equipment

You don't technically need any special equipment to make this Summer Roll Salad. You can simply use a large knife and cutting board to shred all the lettuce and julienne the carrots. However, that doesn't mean there are a couple of gadgets and tools that might make this salad even easier to throw together than it already is.

• Pizza cutter to cut the rice paper into noodles.
• Japanese mandoline, for faster uniform slicing
• Regular mandoline with storage container
• Salad spinner is absolutely necessary for a house that eats a lot of salads because wet, soggy greens are the enemy of good salads.
• Glass mixing bowls that can also double as the serving bowl
• Chef's knife, my personal workhorse
• Wooden cutting board, oversized for all those radish cubes
• Vegetable peeler once I switched to this from the old-school swivel style, I never looked back

For the dressing, these tools are also helpful

• Citrus squeezer. You can squeeze citrus by hand, but my cheap frugal value-driven heart likes to squeeze out EVERY last nano-drop of juice
• Garlic press. You can mince by hand, but why? Take the help whenever you can!
• 2-ounce (4 tablespoons) liquid measuring cup
• Mini stainless steel whisk
• Small glass mason jars (8 ounces), get rid of those annoying 2-piece metal lids and use these air-tight lids

Best Chilled Noodle Salads You Must Try

• Vietnamese Rice Noodle Salad with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette
• Soba Noodle Salad
• Soba Noodle Salad with Peanut Sauce
• Bibim Naeng Myun, Korean Spicy Buckwheat Noodles
• Jap Chae, Korean Glass Noodle Salad
• Spicy Jap Chae, Korean Glass Noodle Salad with Spicy Sauce

Food for Afterthoughts

There is no doubt that unemployment is tough financially and physically. You pretty much know your financial situation will suck. Consistently. You pretty much know that your physical situation will suck. Consistently. At least there is comfort in knowing that there is consistency in the suckage.

Emotionally, however, unemployment is much more of a nauseating roller coaster than I thought it would be. It’s like the goddamned Texas Cyclone when you’re five years old. Up and down. In a really scary way.

At first, unemployment sucked emotionally. More than anything, it was a massive hit to my pride, as well as real test of my self-confidence. I felt like I had been dumped. *wah wah* How come they don’t want me anymore? Am I not good enough? The sting of becoming unemployed was still fresh in my mind (hey, I wasn’t fired, okay? I simply "became unemployed," and we will leave it at that), and all I could do was nurse my injured pride with Citron, soda, and a twist of lemon. And some very therapeutic blogging.

Funemployment

Then, unemployment was awesome. I didn’t have to work. No work?! Yes, No work!!! It’s like vacation! And though funemployment checks were hardly “compensation,” it was enough to keep me from completely obliterating my savings on frivolous things like bulk instant ramen that would send me into sustained sodium bloat shock day after day.

Then unemployment went back to sucking because even though I had freedom, I had no one “to freedom” (v.) with. It’s just like playing hooky when you really do have a job. Unless your other working friends play hooky, too, there isn’t much to do except stay inside your apartment all day and IM with your friends who are at their jobs, which dammit, you do when you’re at work anyway so it’s a wasted PTO day. Dammit.

Then unemployment was awesome because I realized I could stay out until 3 am every night. Even on a Monday.

But then unemployment sucked because again, I can’t really afford to stay out until 3 am by myself and because my friends who have jobs have to be in bed by 11.

Then unemplyment was awesome because you know what? I have a seven day weekend!

But then it sucked because I realized that not compartmentalizing my (not)work of blogging to a five-day (not)work-week and leaving weekends free to do non-(not)work related leisure activites led me into this strange existence where the line between the real world and the virtual world was blurred and I started thinking that “hanging out with friends” meant IM-ing with total strangers.

Sabbatical

And then it really sucked when the funemployement checks suddenly disappeared. Alright, it wasn’t “suddenly,” but six months sure can creep up on you fast like a nasty case of hives induced by some very aggressive shrimp.

As much as I cried, on my side in the fetal position completely under my down comforter at the foot of my bed, in my sweats that I had been wearing for eleven days straight without laundering during those low, super extreme sucky points of the emotional roller coaster ride, I have to say that I am learning and doing new things that I would never have done before when I was actually sane.

Slowly, I am learning how to budget what little funds I have managed to scrape together each month. I have expanded my repertoire of things I cook at home; have even developed the patience to bake. Slowly, I am finding out what really interests me, and not whatever the “coolest, new thing” is to be interested in. I remembered how much I loved reading when I was little and have been able to sit down for hours on end with a book. I have forced myself to detach myself from the Internet for at least fifteen minutes a day, when I make myself take a shower.

And one thing I have done that I never thought I could ever do is eat by myself in a restaurant.

Un (employment) is a Lonely Number

It's not that I have never eaten by myself. How many nights have I stood half bent over the kitchen sink with a bowl of cereal after a long day at work? How many times have I barely removed the ruffled paper liner in time before inhaling an overgrown muffin in the car on the way to work, leaving behind a thin layer of muffin crumbs on the front of my business-casual, slim-cut-for-ladies button down shirt? Who can count the number of days have I sat at my desk, hunched over my laptop so no wandering co-workers' eyes can catch me surfing the foodporn sites while mindlessly slurping through an afro of paper shredder residue, aka instant ramen?

Oh yes, I have most certainly eaten alone. In private. By myself, but where no one can see me.

But never out in public. In a restaurant.

There is No "I" in Team, but There is in "Eating"

It's an odd fear, really, because normally, my personality weighs much heavier toward the solo side than the social side. I have always been what you might call a loner, Dottie. A rebel. I prefer to live alone rather than with a roommate. In school, I did my best holed up in a dark corner of the library by myself, not with a study group. I always did much better in individual sports like tennis rather than team sports.

At the risk of barring myself from any possibility of recruitment via a random landing of an employer on this blog, I will say that I am not a team player. I do not "team." Everyone in the working world tells everyone else that he or she is a great team player. I can't say it truthfully because though I can function as part of a team without disrupting any sort of cosmic office balance, I can perform effin' miracles if I am the only person in charge of a team of one, myself.

Eating alone in public is a mentally implosive clash of oxymoronic worlds that is too complicated for me to understand. Alone. Public. See what I mean? Opposites.

"To Go" or Not to Go

I could have gotten something delivered. Heck, I could have ordered "to-go." I could have walked into Pho 99 just up the street from me and picked up some summer rolls as if I were so busy at work that I only had time to run out, pick up something and rush back to my desk to work on some monster PowerExcelSpreadPoint with embedded Visio diagrams.

But come on, who are we fooling here? They would know. They would know by the five-day-unlaundered sweats and the un-pedicured feet in flip flops that I don't work in an office. They're not stupid. They would just know that I was a miserable little girl scurrying out for my one outing a day to pick up mere sustenance to consume at home, alone, watching tv. How sad, they'll mouth to each other. She's probably going to go back and continue bingeing whatever series she's currently invested in.

I saved them the guesswork and decided to slink into a chair in the dining room and eat right there. But I still chose a table against the wall. Near the back. Hey, I didn't want to advertise the fact that I'm a total loser. Damn Freudian typing. I meant "loner."

Banh Mi Myself and I

At first, it didn't seem too difficult because I could pretend to be carefully examining the menu that I've seen a hundred times and could probably recite from memory. But then the server came and once I made my order, I almost might have held onto that menu a little too long as she took it away. I was at a loss. I had no idea what to do with myself.

It was nerve-racking. No, it was terrifying. I was extremely self-conscious. I felt like the staff were huddled behind the counter giggling about the pathetic girl sitting by herself, like every customer in the dining room was looking at me, shaking their heads in pity, wondering why on earth I was sitting there by myself.

In my logical brain, I know that no one, not a single "they" even cared. I doubt that a single person even looked at me. In fact, there might have been at least one or two others singly enjoying their pho or shrimp summer rolls, or banh mi. But I felt self-conscious the whole time.

Once the food was there, it was better, since I could turn my eyes and attention toward the bowl, but it's not easy keeping your face down in the rising steam for ten minutes. I had to come up for air every once in a while, and I'm sure my face, bright red and glistening with condensed steam and sriracha-induced sweat wasn't a pretty sight. That made me even more self-conscious.

Roll Reversal

It was all over in probably less than 12 minutes, but it felt like an hour. I paid the check and practically ran out of there. I am such a dork.

But at least I can say I did it. I ate by myself. Yay for me.

Now as far banh mi are concerned, I tried it on a separate occasion, eating at Pho 99 with another person. I know that people are wild about banh mi, but I don't get it. It tasted like pho, without the broth or noodles. To me, banh mi just a sandwich with a slightly different flavor that comes from the pickled vegetables. Nothing more.

I'll stick with Summer Rolls. But let's go together, okay? Eating by myself just isn't fun.