Living alone, I usually prepare ingredients and meals the Sunday before my week begins, such as a quinoa salad or a pot of beef stew that will last me until Wednesday or Thursday at best. This is until I feel it has been in the fridge long enough and is starting to become gross. For my wannabe healthy weeks, I prepared Vietnamese rolls for a week and am now ditching the salads.
There was a time when I thought eating salads would be the easiest way to healthy, but the number of ingredients required to prepare a healthy and hearty salad just wasn't working for me. After trying the vietnamese rolls, I found so many perks to them that made them a "salad-level-healthy" meal for me.
These are top three reasons why I'm now totally obsessed with Vietnamese rolls:
1. Potentially a lot of ingredients but you can prepare them to last for the week.
I prepared all the ingredients on the Sunday and packed each vegetable in their own individual air tight boxes. The vegetables I chose to use all kept well for the week.
2. Filling but is low in calories.
Other than vegetables and boiled meat, the roll is kept together with a sheet of rice paper. The rice roll wraps a ton of fillings but is also low in calories. Rice paper only has around 20 calories per sheet.
3. Minimal cooking and everything that needs to be cooked is boiled.
The noodles, beansprouts, and rice paper only needed to be soaked in hot water. Meats, just boiled. This also meant the ingredients could be taken out any morning, wrapped and packed without any reheating. You don't even need to reheat meat that's been boiled and refrigerated. Practically a salad in a roll.
Of course they were also so tasty. By itself or with sauce, they both taste great. Try eating them with Vietnamese dipping sauce, I guarantee you they'll pass off as restaurant–grade spring rolls. If I'm not packing these for a day at school, I purchased a Vietnamese dipping sauce from the supermarket, but you can also find a lot of easy to make sauces that Vietnamese roll recipes feature.
After eating them for a lot of lunches and dinners during my week, I surprisingly didn't get sick of them. The meats and vegetables you choose to include are all up to you and changeable throughout the week.