Learning To Cook Our Favourite Restaurant Foods - Vietnamese Salad Rolls

Salad rolls with peanut sauce. Fresh, colourful, and tasty. Very tasty.
Recipe at bottom of page.

Eating out is fun. Who doesn't like someone else to do all the cooking and cleaning up? But at what cost to your food budget?

Eating out accounts for about 44% of what the average North American stuffs in their pie hole every year. The food bought may be yummy, but it is also several times more expensive than the same food made at home. 

Many years ago Linda and I were looking to tighten our budget. Eating out was a natural place to look to save a lot of money. 

Rice paper is available in the import section of your grocery store.

We decided to eliminate eating outside our home, something that could potentially save us thousands of dollars a year. 

We began to miss some of our favourite restaurant foods. We had to either learn to live without them, or learn to make them ourselves. We chose the later alternative.

That meant learning to make dishes from Mexico, India, Thailand, and Vietnam, among others. It has also meant many years of enjoyment learning about different cultures, geographies, and foods. 

Vietnamese salad rolls with peanut sauce provided one such tasty lesson. 

We had them tonight, and they did not disappoint. We added dried basil and green onions from our garden. Salad rolls often include shrimp or pork. We made ours with tofu.

They are considered an hor d'oeuvre, although we ate ours as a main course. 

Next time we will pair them with a hot and sour soup recipe that we made earlier this week for the first time.

Our cooking knowledge has come in handy now that we live in a rural area where there are few restaurants of the type we would frequent back in the day. 

We can still enjoy the foods we learned to love in restaurants, and save a ton of money in the process.

Start saving money now by reducing restaurant visits, and increasing home cooked meals. Save money, have fun, eat well. That's what I call a win-win-win.

Vietnamese Salad Rolls With Peanut Sauce Recipe


In this recipe, the only thing that needs to be cooked is rice noodles, and they cook quickly, say, 2-3 minutes at a boil. When they are done, drain and use cold water to cool off. Drain again.

The tricky part is rehydrating and handling the rounds of rice paper. The dry rounds are immersed in warm water for a few seconds. I leave mine in the water for up to 60 seconds, then transfer them to a clean, dry cloth for another 30 seconds (to absorb water), then on to a plate for filling and rolling.

I usually soak and use two at a time to make a roll. That is because a single rice paper is difficult to handle and roll without tearing. 


Once on the plate, we filled the round with:

- rice noodles, cold

- marinated baked tofu, strips

- green onions

- shredded carrot

- shredded lettuce

- bell pepper, sliced

- basil, fresh or dried



To roll up:

- filling should be at bottom end of round. Fold sides in and over the filling a bit, then start rolling up from the bottom, holding it all together as you go. Be patient, and once you get going and repeatedly make one after another, it becomes meditative. If you roll it tightly it will all stick together, no problem.



To make the peanut sauce combine:

3 tbsp peanut butter

2 tsp   Bragg or soy sauce

1 tsp   sesame oil

1/2 tsp chili flakes

Top with a few fresh peanuts.


If sauce is thick it can be used as is, or if you like it runnier, dilute with a bit of water, or coconut milk if you have some on hand. 


Enjoy.