Spring Rolls, Sushi, and Galactic Scale

Today I Learned:
1) How to make spring rolls! The crispy chinese kind. Without meat. Anyway, here's what goes in them:

* About 2/3 of a block of tofu, finely chopped
* a cup or so of finely minced vegetables (recipe recommended carrot, onion, and wood-ear mushroom; I used wood-ear mushroom and Trader Joes' cabbage/carrot slaw mix)
* A couple cloves of garlic
* A cup or so of cooked bean thread (I used rice vermicelli and it worked fine)
* Some small amount of soy sauce
* Some small amount of sugar
* Some small amount of pepper
* Some small amount of salt

These things get mixed in a bowl. Then you lay out a spring roll wrapper (get these at Asian marts, internet recipes claim American ones suck, but IDK), put a little bit* of the filling in one corner, roll it up enough that the filling is tucked in, fold the sides over so that the edges are "vertical", and wrap it the rest of the way up. Use a mix of water and corn starch to seal the last bit. Repeat this until you run out of filling or you run out of wrappers, whichever comes first.

To cook these things, just fry them in vegetable oil at about 300-350 F (yeah, I actually measured it -- it was slightly below a 5 on my stovetop). Make sure the rolls have room to move around in the pan/pot/wok. Takes about 7 minutes of cooking per roll-batch.

* The trick for apportioning is to bear in mind that the final roll is going to be a little bit bigger than the size of the stuffing (though oddly, variation in stuffing size mostly seemed to change the length of my rolls, not their girth). It doesn't take much.

2) When making sushi, don't make all of your ingredients salty. It's good to have something a like cucumber or avocado or crab meat to offset the saltiness of the rice and any pickled ingredients.

3) The civilized part of the Star Wars galaxy has about a million inhabited planets of note. Also, the New Republic never gained control of nearly as many planets as the Empire before it or the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances (the reformed government put together from the scraps of the governments that survived the first half of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion).