I grow enough vegetables to cook and squirrel away much of the harvest for winter, but the best part about the summer growing season is rolling all of those fresh flavors into daily meals. This means literally rolling them together in the recipe I share this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon.

Summer rolls have just a couple of cooked ingredients—noodles and perhaps a protein—but the rest of the filling and wrapper remain raw. This makes them ideal not just for at-home meals when you want to minimize oven time but also at a picnic, on the water, and anywhere else you can spread out some fresh vegetables and set up a rolling space. Summer rolls taste and hold together best when there’s minimal time between rolling and eating. So when we want to enjoy summer rolls on a lake cruise, I cook up the noodles and shrimp and mix the dipping sauce at home, cut up vegetables either before I leave the house or before we start rolling, and have everything spread out to grab and roll before I dampen the first wrapper.

Learn more about making summer rolls and get the complete recipe for Summer Rolls with Lime-Chili Sauce in my column.

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Twice as Tasty

The jar-and-shake instructions I give for the summer roll dipping sauce should look familiar: It’s the same technique I use for everything from marinades to salad dressings. For dipping, I typically leave out the oil, so you don’t need to shake until the ingredients emulsify. But it’s still any easy way to combine the flavors and transport the sauce.

Those sauce ingredients can change depending on preferred diet and tastes, as well as what you keep in your kitchen. Fish sauce, made of fermented anchovies, and lime juice enhance the shrimp and instantly put me in mind of Thai dishes. If I’m making vegetarian summer rolls with tofu, soy sauce or tamari doubles down on the soy flavor. When I’m in the mood for a thicker, creamy sauce, I might blend the liquid ingredients into some peanut butter.

Here are just a few other recipes on the blog that I like to serve with a dipping sauce. You can find more in the recipe index.

• Stuffed Squash Blossoms
• Scratch-Made Pot Stickers
• Mediterranean Fish Cakes
• Zucchini–Basil Pancakes

You can learn more about saving summer vegetables in this blog post.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.