Kitchen creativity

For the past couple days I've been busy cooking in the kitchen. While it is a lot of fun and exciting for me, I'm learning still that I am not perfect and things go wrong all the time. I've been wanting to make my own spring rolls for the longest time (the fresh ones, not fried). However, I accidentally bought lumpia wrappers. They didn't have spring roll wrappers at A-Dong Market. I considered throwing everything out, but decided to go for it and make lumpia with the prepared vegetables instead. I added tofu to it as well. lumpia can be served fresh, but it isn't that good and it falls apart very easily.
Yesterday, I didn't plan on making anything, but I just had to do something in the kitchen. So before Lydia came to pick me up for ultimate frisbee I baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
Tonight I wanted to try three different recipes. They all are very different foods. I made a shrimp and spinach salad, sweet potato fries, and beet/blue cheese deviled eggs. The only one that seemed to be completely successful was the deviled eggs. They are pink in the middle because of the beet puree and the blue cheese is just a nice dash of zip. The shrimp salad was quite good (Cooking Light recipe). However, I had to improvise on the dressing when the stopper/spout on the olive oil bottle decided to fall out giving me more than the 1 Tablespoon needed. The sweet potato fries were my attempt at making them better than my mom. Her fries are always soft and never crispy. I sliced them thinly with my mandoline, hoping this would improve on crispiness factor. Alas, they just burned faster. I think the only good way to make fries is by actually frying them. That's why they are called fries, not bakes.
There are other deviled egg recipes on chow.com (my new favorite website). I'd really like to try the wasabi and roe deviled eggs:
http://www.chow.com/stories/11747
I also received help as to how to peel a hard-boiled egg. Every method I've tried has been a failure with me taking huge chunks out of the egg white. This is a fool-proof method: http://www.chow.com/stories/10879
If you have the time, just check out more from chow.com. I really love watching the obsessives videos (especially the sake, absinthe, and offal ones).