This week was ambitious! We distributed kits to the first graders so we could make Vietnamese spring rolls (gỏi cuốn) together over Zoom from all the various places from which students attend school during distance learning. We started by washing our hands, then dipping a sheet of rice paper into a bowl of water. Warm is ideal if you make the recipe again at home, but cold works just as well. When the paper began to soften, we removed it from the bowl and placed it on a flat surface. If you leave the paper in the water too long, it gets increasingly more sticky and difficult to work with.
Students loaded up the lower third of the rice paper with our fillings: lettuce, carrots, braised tofu, Thai basil, cilantro, spearmint, red cabbage, and rice noodles seasoned with toasted sesame oil. We folded from the bottom up over the filling, then folded the paper in from each side, then continued to roll up from the bottom to form our first spring roll. Each student received a small jar of dipping sauce that could be poured into a small dish or poured directly into the spring roll as we ate.
The read aloud for this week was the book A Different Pond by Bao Phi and illustrated by Thi Bui. In the story, a boy goes fishing with his father to feed their family. He hears stories from the country where his parents come from, Vietnam, and about a war that took his uncle’s life, and wonders what life is like there. In class we talked about the meaning of the word refugee and how the refugee experience is another important aspect of American culture. As the first grade chefs rolled and ate their second spring roll, we watched short videos of rice paper and rice noodles being made by hand in Vietnam. We learned that it’s the bamboo drying racks that make the cross hatched pattern on the rice paper and that really big rice paper is then cut into noodles on a machine.
After eating our final rolls, we had a little brain break and dance party to a song all about rice and how it’s eaten around the world from the new Netflix series produced by Barack and Michelle Obama called Waffles and Mochi. There’s a whole episode about rice, so it was a nice tie-in to what we’re studying this year in first grade. Congratulations to all our chefs for trying a recipe with a lot of steps during distance learning. You did it!
