Marby's Shrimp Lumpia

     When I finally arrived home from a long vacation in Australia, there was nothing in my refrigerator except water, two slices of bread, half a package of phyllo pastry and some fishballs frozen solid since May.  I made do with the dodgy fishballs and some soba noodles on the first day, but come the second day I knew I needed to get myself to the nearest supermarket or I'd have to settle for a phyllo sandwich.  

     I live alone and do everything by myself; the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the dishes, the grocery shopping.  When you haven't got a lot of free time on your hands, you like things to be done in a jiffy, and most of the time, that also applies to what I eat.  I prefer to make meals I can whip up in a few minutes, so I can save the extra time for other chores.  I had been away from home for a whole month, and so there was a month's worth of cleaning, laundry, bills and work waiting to be sorted out.  When I went to the grocery store to restock my refrigerator, I was looking for easy meals to make.  Fried chicken.  Stir-fried pork.  Ham and mushroom pasta.  Steamed dory fillets.  Then as I was walking past the frozen food section, I spied a package of ready-made lumpia.  Ooh, I thought.  Should take me under 10 minutes to fry up those suckers and have a nice, quick, satisfying meal.  

     Wrong.  Not about the 10-minute cooking time, but on this shrimp lumpia making a nice, satisfying meal.  How do I begin to describe the horror that it was?  How it contaminated my perfectly savory rice (Dona Maria Miponica!), and tainted the purity of my white dinner plate?  The package came with a packet of red-orange sauce which I thought was sweet-sour sauce, but it tasted nothing like it.  An accurate description?  Try 'suspicious glop made of unidentifiable ingredients suspended in red-orange liquid most likely to be food coloring and water.'  As for the lumpia itself, I could taste no shrimp in it at all.  What I could taste was wet cardboard seasoned in salt and someone's armpit sweat.  

     I would've had eaten better if I had just sauteed a wet newspaper in a saucepan.  I should've known that ₱29 for a package of spring rolls meant a bad deal.  For that cheap, they can't possibly even have the equivalent of one shrimp in the bag.  Or half a shrimp, even.  But I'll bet my suspicions about flavored cardboard being in the mix was right on the money.  

     So, what became of the rest of the lumpia pictured above?  I brought them to my mother's house last Sunday and asked Manang Aida to cook them and feed them to Georgie and Charm.  The dogs.  I have yet to find out next Sunday whether the substandard spring rolls have been successfully fried and fed to the pets.  But I've got a feeling Georgie and Charm just turned up their noses, and went to sniff in the garbage.