Nacho lasagna

New recipe! Last night I decided to play around again with my favorite secret ingredient, spring roll wrappers. I've wrapped them around a million different ingredients from mushrooms & brie to salmon cream cheese, folded shapes from cones to pockets, and ranged from appetizers to side dishes to desserts. What I hadn't ever done was baked the wrappers flat, or attempted a full-fledged meal. What to do with plate-sized, flat crispy sheets? Well, the blog title and photo probably gave it away...


Here's what you'll need (serves three very hungry folks):
1 package spring roll wrappers (I like to use O'Tasty)
butter
1 box spanish rice
4 teaspoons hot sauce
1/2 medium onion
1 can spicy beans, drained
1 medium tomato
lime juice
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
sour cream
coarse salt
(optional) spicy enchilada sauce mixed with tomato paste

(You will want about ninety minutes to prepare the recipe, plus an hour or two to let everything cool. This recipe is served at room temperature so that steam doesn't sog up the crisp sheets instantly. But an illusion of heat is provided by the spices.)


Step one: Peel off spring roll sheets two at a time and butter them on one side with a very thin layer.


Step two: Bake in preheated 350-degree oven, sandwiched between two cooling racks on a baking sheet, for 6 or 7 minutes until wrappers are crispy and hold their shape, but aren't yet burnt.


Step three: Let wrappers cool while you put in the next pair. (After sheets are cool, I propped them up on their side next to each other, rather than stack them, so that any remaining heat or moisture could escape.) Repeat 7 more times until you have 15 wrappers total.


Step four: Make spanish rice, with hot sauce added from the beginning and with diced onion tossed in at the very end. You'll want to get this as dry as possible, so you could skimp a bit on the amount of water called for by the box.


Step five: Drain and rinse the beans. I heated the beans in the oven for a while to get them more dry (without being cracking). I also put half of a diced tomato in with the beans to get slightly cooked with the beans.


Step six: I reserved the other half of the diced tomato for a topping. Squeeze semi-dry and then douse them in lime juice.

Step seven: Take a break for an hour or two to make sure that things get dried out on the counter, on the stovetop, and on paper towels. Dryness is key.


Step eight: To give the dish more heat, I used some hot enchilada sauce thickened with tomato paste that we happened to have in the fridge from another recipe. It probably isn't worth duplicating just for a few smears on the plate, but you might you might be able to improvise something similar, a thick hot sauce of some kind.


Step nine: Start layering: First a spring roll sheet, then the bean/tomato mixture with cheddar cheese, then another sheet, then the rice/onion mixture, then another sheet, then repeat the steps a second time: Five sheets total, with two layers each of mixture.


Step ten: On top, add sour cream, diced tomatoes, and course salt.

Serve and eat immediately (as the layers will become soggy within ten to fifteen minutes regardless).

I should also note that this doesn't taste much different than the much easier regular plate of nachos ... but, hey, there's something to be said for presentation, right?