Cheater's Way to Homemade Egg Rolls

We love Chinese food but it can get expensive to order out all the time. I decided we should make some at home. We had previously done egg rolls (which I'm sure you can find in a blog post of mine somewhere) but they didn't really turn out right (if I remember right, they tasted good but they didn't look close to right and were kind of hard to make). That was because we had attempted to make our own wrappers for those.

This time, we cheated and used store bought wrappers. Also, instead of spending the time chopping and shredding carrots and cabbage, we just bought a bag of coleslaw mix. This obviously really cuts down on the prep time!

We loosely followed this recipe. We only used half a pound of ground chicken. I might've used the whole pound had we had that much but we had used the other half in a different dish the night before. I still think they had plenty of protein and we usually cut the meat in half anyway for recipes. However, if you have a whole pound, I would consider using it. Or maybe even just bumping up the chicken to 3/4 of a pound would be good. The problem with ground chicken is it doesn't crumble the way ground beef does so it's harder to distribute between all the egg rolls.

Other differences between our recipe and theirs was that we used garlic powder, vegetable oil, and 15 wrappers (see the original recipe for what they used) instead of what was called for. I will mention that our egg rolls were a little empty but that was because we didn't roll them as tight as we could've. The carrots and cabbage kept ripping the wrappers if we went tighter. They still turned out great though.

I would definitely make this recipe again but boy was it greasy! The outside grease mostly got absorbed by the paper towel while they were cooling on the plate but somehow, the insides got greasy too. It didn't taste like we were eating sludge but sometimes, it looked like it. If we wrapped them in napkins as bit into them, the grease factor was significantly improved though. Don't let my description stop you from trying these though! They are worth the heart attack (Or you could take the healthier road and try to bake them).

I also liked the instructions for rolling these closed and I had never heard of using the flour/water paste before to seal them. Ours did take longer than 10 seconds each to cook. I believe we did 30 seconds each and they didn't come out as dark as restaurant ones do but they still managed to be crunchy.