Thai Salad Rolls on a Summer Day

I just love a cold lunch of Thai salad rolls and spicy peanut sauce, on a hot summer afternoon. I'm slowly getting better at rolling them. My first efforts a few months back tended to be very loose and they would flatten rather than being round cylinders.

In this bento you also see the crab sausage I made in Avie's crab sausage maker!! I used hot dogs and they are tougher than vienna sausages so I got some crab leg breakage. My mom hated vienna sausages so much that she made my dad go sit in the backyard to eat them. I can picture him still, sitting in a lawn chair with a can of Budweiser in the grass, extracting vienna sausages from the can with a fork. But since Avie's crab thingy is going to work better with them, I will buy some viennas soon - sorry mom.

I learned a useful trick from a waiter in a local Thai restaurant: Take a dry wrap from the package and cut it in half, then use this half inside a whole wrap, right in the middle where the main ingredient weight is going to be.

This helps prevent the wraps, which are very fragile, from bursting and enables you to roll tighter.

And here's my last bento using the NeonVegas umeboshi onigiri I made: it also has pork gyoza, a shoyu tamago with mixed red pepper, sugar snap peas stuffed in around the onigiri, cherry tomatoes, and a Ferrero Rocher chocolate hazelnut delight.

Nummy times!! We are going to go out and pick strawberries tomorrow at a local farm, weather and berries permitting. Strawberry pie!!