Eggroll and Udon Soup

We recently decided to make eggrolls, which are easy to make, but time consuming.

To make the Eggrolls, we cooked up a combination of ground beef and pork - approximately 5-6 pounds worth altogether since we were making a LOT - seasoning the meat liberally with Realsalt and organic seasoned salt, and then peppering it conservatively. I am not a fan of pepper and neither is my hubby, but it really does make a difference to add some to the mix. As the meat cooks - stirred and mashed occasionally - we chopped and sliced, 2 heads of cabbage, 2 onions, 2 bunches of green onions, several stalks of celery, and then shredded several carrots. (All organic.)

When adding the veggies to the meat mix, my hubby also poured in a cup and a half of soy sauce, 2-3 spoonfuls of brown sugar (sucanat), and 6 eggs. NOTE, this was in a 10 quart stock pot, and even then we sometimes need a second pot as it cooks, lol!

Once all of the veggies have cooked, the entire mix is poured into a large colander over a bowl. The mix then goes into eggroll wraps, and then the eggroll is deep fried (I try to use lard or tallow for all my deep frying, but this time I used Hain sunflower oil), but even after 90 eggrolls, we still had left over mix, plus all that wonderful juice!

So, I took the juice - which filled half of a gallon jar - added a half gallon of water to it, and boiled a package of Udon noodles to make soup. To that, I added the left over mix from the eggrolls, and voila! Eggroll and Udon soup! Yumyumyum... I totally plan to make just the mix again sometime soon so that I can make this soup again. :-)

A good side to go with this soup - especially if you happen to be deep frying eggrolls anyway - is cream cheese wontons. They are actually super simple to make. I took 2 packages of organic cream cheese and added maple syrup - or honey - to taste. I like mine not so sweet, so I think I only added 2 spoonfuls, then I mixed it with my electric mixer until it was smoothly blended.

Scoop the mix into wonton wraps, seal, and then deep fry. WARNING! These are addictive!

This post is part of the Traditional Tuesdays Blog Carnival!
http://www.cookingtf.com/2011/08/30/traditional-tuesdays-12/