There aren't that many ways to eat a salad.

With the familiar presentation of green leaves tossed in a salad bowl with dressing, you have to rely on the array of breads and wraps - roti, tortilla sheets, pita bread, Moroccan flatbread - expressly fashioned for eating with salad. Or you choose some roasted meat, beans or fish.

With the injunction to eat fruits and vegetables at least five times a day, I look for as many different ways to eat my greens as I can. And if they are raw as they would be in a salad, all the better for the vitamins would be better preserved.

We do not really have many salad eating options in Singapore. The nonya kway pie tee could be described as salad (or rather vegetables) in a cup. And the popiah is but a vegetable roll.

While the vegetables are cooked in these cases, there is nothing to prevent you from making a raw version. I did one with pie tee shells the other day using a raw green mango salad as filling.

It was refreshing and satisfying, thanks to the fried flour cup, which unfortunately moves that recipe out of the healthy range.

For imaginative salad options, one should look at Vietnamese cuisine where they have many ways to eat a salad.

Sometimes, their pomelo or banana flower salads come on a crisp rice cracker. Then, of course, they wrap their fresh salad in rice paper. This fresh roll, called goi cuon, usually comprises pork, prawn, wrapped together with lettuce, herbs and rice vermicelli in a sheet of rice paper.

Taking that idea further, I do versions of it depending on what I have in the fridge. So it could be avocado and crab, carrot and cucumber sticks with chopped nuts or prawn and radish sprouts.

These rolls need no real cooking, are convenient to eat and lovely to look at if you add some colour, which could come from a carrot, a chilli or a mango, as in this case.

More importantly, it is a perfect disguise for a salad for those of you who have families who will not eat green leaves!

The rice paper sheet makes an excellent wrap as it is quite hardy and yet delicate so it does not sit heavy in the stomach.

In Vietnam, you can get several varieties of rice papers of different shapes and thicknesses, but here we get only the dried rounds easily, measuring about 17cm in diameter. They are obtainable from the dried food section in supermarkets.

While many recipes advise dampening the rice paper with a wet towel or with warm water, you do not need to do this. There is enough moisture in the salad ingredients themselves to soften the paper sufficiently for rolling.

While there is crabmeat in the roll, vegetarians could easily omit it and also use salt instead of fish sauce in the accompanying nut dip recipe.

But vegetarian or not, this fresh roll is a delight.

There is nothing like a chilled parcel of crisp crunchy vegetables, dunked in a savoury nut sauce to hit the spot at lunch.

With the hot weather upon us, a chilled salad roll is a perfect delivery system for eating greens.

Sylvia Tan is a freelance writer

Crabmeat and mango salad in a rice paper roll (for four)

• 8-10 dried rice paper rounds, measuring about 17 cm in diameter
• 1 cup crabmeat
• Half a mango, peeled and sliced into thick slivers
• 4 butter lettuce leaves, hard stems flattened
• Half a cucumber, shredded coarsely
• Fresh mint and sweet basil leaves
• 1 bunch coriander leaves, separated into sprigs

NUT DIP

• 1 cup roasted peeled almonds, chopped fine
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 1 red chilli, chopped fine
• 1 stalk lemon grass, chopped fine
• 1 tsp. fish sauce or to taste
• 1 tbs sugar or to taste
• 1 tbs lime juice or to taste

METHOD

Lay a sheet of dried rice paper on a flat plate. Line it with a lettuce leaf. Top with shredded cucumber and fresh herbs, including a sprig of coriander. Add a dollop of crabmeat.

By this time, the greens would have softened the dried rice paper a little. You should be able to roll it up like a popia, encasing the filling snugly, folding in one end of the paper.

Tuck a sliver of mango into the open end of the roll. Repeat for the other rolls. You should have enough to make eight rolls altogether.

Place in the fridge, covered with cling film, to chill. Serve chilled with the almond nut sauce, made by blending all the dip ingredients together and adjusting to taste.

Note: In my last column on grilled lemon grass chicken, I neglected to mention that the chicken should be threaded onto bamboo skewers, interspersed between lime leaves. Fortunately, many of you cottoned on to that step and even improvised on the recipe to much appreciation, you reported.

This article was first published in Mind Your Body, The Straits Times on Feb 27, 2008.

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