Experiments From Auntie's Test Kitchen
L is for Lettuce Wraps
As I've stated many times, I am NOT a big fan of hyped food crazes, but I am working on trying new things.
I've always been a big fan of sandwiches ("sammich"es as my dad called them). As a kid, I relished the day when the school cafeteria presented us with peanut butter and honey sandwiches on white bread. At home, we put everything from bologna, to meatloaf, to just tomato, cheese and mayonnaise between two slices of white bread and enjoyed it.
As a side note: I didn't subscribe to eating wheat bread until a few years ago when they finally made it taste good instead of like moldy cardboard.
No, I'm not in the "all bread/carbs are evil" camp. However, for health reasons I have to limit my starchy carbohydrate consumption. I figured a healthy way to have a sandwich lunch without too much bread would be a lettuce wrap.
As the name implies, a lettuce wrap is essentially all the sandwich ingredients wrapped in lettuce. I searched several websites to find the best method for creating these. Weeding through these websites was a confusing plethora of ads, vague instructions, and plain old hype. So I was pretty much on my own. I bought my ingredients and made two separate attempts at it.
I refuse to post any photos here because all my wraps ended up looking like a sandwich murder scene.
Other than the chicken disaster, this was the worst experience I've had so far with this challenge. No matter how much lettuce I used, the wraps didn't stay together during wrapping or eating. If I wanted something to continually fall apart while I ate it, I'd go to Subway! Unlike the chicken disaster, I can, and did, repurpose the leftovers rather than throw them away.
If someone can show me in person how to successfully make these things, I'll try again. Other than that, no thank you! I'll just save my starchy carbs for a real sammich.
Update:
A friend sent me this video:
After watching the video, I made two new attempts at making the wrap. For starters, parchment paper is ridiculously expensive, so I opted for wax paper. Also, her advice about using green leaf lettuce was spot on. The food bloggers who said you could make these things with iceberg lettuce were masochists. Though they turned out better than the first attempts, they still fell apart faster than a Subway sandwich (y'all know what I'm talking about). Trying to keep them from falling apart without eating some of the paper was also a crapshoot.
Conclusion? Nope, the experience is still too frustrating to proceed, and the taste is so unsatisfying that it makes me mad. Like I said earlier, I need a hands-on tutorial/critique. Until then, I'll stick with a real sammich.
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