Shanghai Noon: Philippine Fried Egg Rolls, Shanghai Style

Lumpia Shanghai from Reynaldo Alejandro's The Philippine Cookbook:

1. Combine pork, shrimp,water chestnuts, green onion, egg and soy sauce.
2. Seasons with salt and pepper.
3. Place a level tablespoon of filling on each egg roll wrapper and seal with a few drops of water.
4. Deep fry in hot oil and drain on paper towel.
5. Serve with sweet and sour sauce.

Sounds, easy enough?  Right?  For an amateur fryer like me I had to sacrifice 2 -3 pieces to find out that the oil was too hot and even though the outside was almost burnt, the inside was still raw.  I did change a few of the steps, like using a spoon to fill each egg roll wrapper.

Here's the shrimp prior to cutting it up.  I finally get to use the knife set my parents gave me and Will for our birthday.  They worked great!

Here is the combined ingredients prior to wrapping.  It doesn't look appetizing, yet.

The technique:  I learned this trick from watching so much cooking shows.  You take a zip - lock bag, fill it with meat and cut out the corner to make it into a piping bag.  Worked great for me.

Wrap the lumpia!  Look how dramatic they look.  The wrapper I used was the only one I found available at the local grocery, so it's thicker than the normal lumpia wrappers found at the Filipino or Asian Grocery.  

This fryer was given to me by my cousin Marc for Christmas 2008, I finally get to use it!

This part scared me the most.  Is it cooked?  It looks burnt.  It took me several tries and finally realized that the fire had to be on a medium-low setting and the lumpia floats once it's almost cooked.  I have to let it brown after it floats or else it looks too pale.

You'll see that they don't exactly look like the traditional lumpia because I used a thicker wrapper.  They look more like those egg rolls from Panda Express (but they taste better!).