The key to making a good smorgasbord of fillings for Vietnamese pork summer rolls is to make sure to have lots of the fresh ingredients on hand. For our summer rolls, I julienned some carrots and baby cucumbers, then amassed a heap of leafy green lettuce, mint, Thai basil and chopped scallions (by the way, have you seen this amazing pictorial graphic of salad greens assembled by Bon Appetit? I’m kind of obsessed). You can rinse, chop and arrange these things as you cook some rice noodles, which are an essential filling for summer rolls. You need the rice noodles to add gravitas to the roll, which might just float away without any real sustenance otherwise.

Another important part of the whole do-it-yourself party is to make sure you have shallow bowls or dishes set aside with water in them to wet your rice paper. I picked up one of these handy bowls at a Vietnamese market near my house recently. but if you don’t want to invest in one (and I totally understand why you wouldn’t, because it truly is a single-use item that takes up way too much space), I’ve found that a large dinner plate with just a little bit of a recessed part in the middle holds just enough water to do the trick. Soaking the rice paper takes mere seconds — you want it pliable enough so that you can roll the rice paper, but not so soft that it disintegrates in your hands. Once you get the hang of it though, it’s easy.

We taught Ge Ge how to roll his own Vietnamese pork summer rolls. After a few total fails, he caught on. Soak rice paper until just bendable. Add julienne carrots and cucumbers. Sprinkle ground pork mixture on top, then add greens and noodles. Fold in the tops, then roll from one side to the other. Pictured above is Ge Ge’s own handiwork. He insisted that I take a picture and post his creation. Not bad, right?

The best part of DIY Vietnamese summer pork roll night is that both cooking and cleanup are minimal. The only actual cooking that took place was boiling the rice noodles and sauteing the pork mixture. Everything else just got rinsed, spun through a salad spinner, and arranged on plates. Plus, I didn’t have to spend time cajoling the kids to try the summer rolls. For whatever reason, involving them in the assembly process made them more apt to try them.

As a sidenote, I know I talk all the time about how great my kids are at eating, but that doesn’t mean that they’re always up for eating whatever I make all the time. Because I try three to five new recipes every week (many of which don’t even make it onto this blog), I’m bound to have dishes that the kids just flat-out refuse to eat or tell me, very pointedly and loudly, that they DO NOT LIKE. This always, always, always makes a little piece of me die on the inside, even though I know that not every dish can be a winner.

So that’s why the Vietnamese pork summer rolls came as such a surprise to me. I thought for sure that, with all the crazy greens and the ground pork, I was going to lose one, if not both, of my tiny critics. When they both gave me “a hundred stars” for this dish, I figured I’d better share this recipe with you right away, just so you, too, have the chance to try your hand at it before the weather finally cools down on us.

Alternatively, you could just bundle up and make these summer rolls anyway. After all, rules are made for breaking, right?

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