I’ve made lumpia before. So its not like I am experimenting and blogging about it. Not at all. Because I’ve successfully executed lumpia before, I think I felt confident enough to document it for the web.

I’m not a prolific chef or cook by any means, but there are a few Filipino dishes I can make, and one of them is lumpia. So as Christmas approached, I figured, hey. Why not make lumpia for work potlucks (it was a hit today, thanks), to give away, and just to have for Trin and myself. So I did. What you see above is the beginning (after chopping and food processing the onions, carrots, water chestnuts and two pounds of shrimp).

And here are the finished products. By no means was this all that came out of six pounds of ground pork, oh no. This is just what I cooked after rolling those bad boys. How long did it take me to do all this? Let’s see…I believe I started at 7 p.m. and finished with these at about 1 a.m. And that’s with the help of a food processor. Can you imagine if I had tried to chop everything myself? You wouldn’t be seeing lumpia here.

And by the way, the long, skinny eggrolls are Lumpia Shanghai. I made them that long and skinny because they just seemed to come out more uniformly that way. Oh, and when you cut them in half, they’re about the size of a normal lumpia roll. The thicker, shorter ones are turon — a plantain banana half-slice, dipped in sugar and cinnamon and rolled like lumpia. My only regret is not getting riper plantains. But it seemed to be fine, they all disappeared in short order when I brought them to the web team potluck.

You can see most of the cooking process by poking through the Flickr set.

You can probably expect to see more blog posts like this — while I was at a meeting Sunday with my AAJA-LA co-pres, Trinity found this book while wandering around Barnes and Noble. The thing I like about this book is that it includes all the dishes I want to learn, in a non-complicated way. Heee!