I love fried foods. If I could eat them for every meal, I would. But, I also would like to live long enough to see my grandchildren. So we’ve been trying to eat a bit healthier and make some small changes. One of my favorite things to make is egg rolls. But with meat and deep frying, we wanted to try something different. We recently bought a Ninja Air Fryer. I’ve only used it twice so far and I do like it for these two reasons:

1. The basket and inside parts are dishwasher safe!
2. The basket is large enough that you can put in an entire bag of frozen french fries at once.

So last night, I decided to try some veggie egg rolls.

Ingredients:

• Shredded cabbage (about 1 small head)
• Shredded carrots (to taste, about the proportion you’d use in coleslaw)
• Finely chopped green onions
• Chopped zucchini or squash (1 medium-sized)
• Egg roll wrappers (I use Nasoya brand, available in most grocery stores)
• Pam Olive Oil

Cut up all the veggies and line them up into bowls to make an assembly line. Get a small bowl of warm water for closing the wraps. See the previous egg rolls recipe for how to assemble the egg rolls. Apologies for my photos here. I was packing these pretty full so mine ended up more square than tubular. It does not affect taste, just looks.

Tip: Don’t assemble all the egg rolls at once. Get four of the egg rolls assembled and starting to cook and then start assembling the rest. By the time you are done with the next few egg rolls, the first batch will be cooked.

Cooking:

You can fit about 4 egg rolls per batch in the basket. (I had one left over for the last batch and squeezed 5 in, but 4 does work better).

I pre-heated my fryer at 390 degrees for 3 minutes – the same as I did for frozen french fries.

Spray the basket with olive oil (vegetable oil works too, but olive is better for you).

Spray one side of your egg rolls with oil. Place the oiled side down in the fryer basket. Then spray the other side of your egg rolls with oil. You don’t need to soak them. Just a light coating.

Play with your fryer. I found one recipe online that suggested 390 degrees for 6 minutes, flip and then do another 6 minutes. My egg rolls looked almost burned after the first 6 minutes doing this. After playing a bit, I found that for my Ninja Air Fryer, the ideal was:

• 390 degrees for 4 minutes, flip with rubber tongs, and then cook an additional 4 minutes.

Keeping warm:

Since there are 8 minutes for each batch and you end up with about 5 batches, the total time for this takes about 40 minutes. I didn’t want my first batch of egg rolls to be cold by the time I finished. So put them on a pan and turned the oven on. I did mine way too hot at 350 degrees and we had to definitely let the egg rolls cool for several minutes. I’d suggest putting it at about 250 degrees for the egg rolls to keep warm.

Honesty moment:

These were good. They were not as good as the ones I make that are deep fried in a pan full of oil. But the difference was small enough that I can live with it. And that’s the point, isn’t it?