Recipes Discovered

Pad Thai Recipe

Where we used to live, there was an over abundance of Thai restaurants. At our current location, there is one Thai restaurant and it’s possibly the worst place I have ever eaten and I will not go back, no matter how much I crave Pad Thai. I tried finding a recipe so I could make it myself, but most of them require ingredients that I can’t find. After a lot of searching, I finally found a recipe at www.realsimple.com.

The recipe starts with dry rice noodles that are soaked in water for a half hour. The only package of rice noodles I found at my store though said to cook them in boiling water for 5 minutes, so that’s what I did and they turned out very good. I cubed the tofu and then drained it by placing it between a few layers of paper towels and putting a book on top. It only takes about 15 minutes to get a lot of the water out. After that, it’s a basic stir fry so make sure all of the ingredients are ready to go in the skillet. I mixed the fish sauce, vinegar, brown sugar and paprika together in a small dish and then sliced up the scallions and red pepper. >> I put a skillet over medium-high heat with the canola oil. When it was hot, I put the garlic in and stir fried it a couple of seconds. The shrimp went in next for a couple minutes, just until they turned pink. I added the tofu to the skillet and it immediately glued itself to the bottom. Just keep everything moving and whatever sticks to the bottom of the skillet will come off with the sauce. I added the egg to the dish and scrambled that for about a minute before adding the sauce and scraping the bottom of the pan. Then I added the cooked noodles to the skillet and mixed everything together. I let it cook for about a minute so the noodles absorbed some of the sauce and then I added the scallions and bean sprouts. I plated it on individual plates and served it with sliced red peppers, extra bean sprouts, lime wedges and topped everything with crushed peanuts.

I was very surprised with how authentic this dish tasted. It was very similar to Pad Thai I have had in restaurants. It wasn’t the best Pad Thai I ever had, but it was excellent for a homemade version. I added a little hoisin sauce to mine because I like the extra flavor. The only other thing I would have liked to have was Thai chili sauce to give it some heat. Other than that, it definitely satisfied my craving for Pad Thai.