February 5: Super Lettuce Wraps

When your mother told you not to play with your food, she wasn't talking about lettuce wraps. This hands-on eating. I suppose you might not consider this a salad dish, but I like to think of it as "finger salads."  I took an informal poll at dinner, and everyone agreed with me that it counts as salad. (And I'm pretty sure they weren't just humoring me because of my contributions to their DNA.)

My daughter and I worked on this meal together, and it was a big success, even with my two eldest granddaughters who have been known to be picky. When a salad goes over big with teens, you know it's tasty!

When I've had this dish in a restaurant, it was served with crunchy bits of deep-fried wonton wrappers. We decided that freshly toasted nuts would give us a better and much healthier crunch. We made two fillings; Thai orange chicken and hoisin pork. In the past I've done vegetarian versions that were every bit as good. We didn't add all of the chili flakes the recipe called for, because my son-in-law and I are both intolerant of spicy foods. Instead, we used served Thai chili sauce on the side.

You can buy hoisin sauce, but it's very easy to make, and so much better with the fresh ingredients. Besides, you can change the balance of the ingredients to suit your taste.

Recipe:
For the hoisin pork filling, we just browned ground pork with diced carrots, hoisin sauce and a little extra garlic. We used a recipe from food.com: http://www.food.com/recipe/hoisin-sauce-recipe-443956

The Thai orange chicken was from All Recipes: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/thai-orange-chicken/ You need to make it with less sauce (We didn't and ended up putting it through a strainer to remove some.) because if it's too runny, you will never keep it in the lettuce!

We used 2 heads of iceburg lettuce; cut out the cores and carefully separate the leaves. For toppings, crush and toast almonds and chop green onions, serve with extra hoisin sauce and Thai red chili sauce.