Pad Thai

This is my husband‘s favorite pad Thai recipe. But if you are just terribly craving for pad Thai dish feeling, you can omit all the vegetables, lol. The heart of this dish, for me, is the pad Thai sauce mixture and the rice noodles. Heck, I’ve even cooked this desperately using bean noodles and it was still awesome. 😅😁

2013.12.11 (Measurements are approximations)

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Ingredients

• rice noodles, 200g

• bean sprouts, 1-2 cups

• carrot (cut into thin strips), 1/4 cup

• red paprika/bell pepper (cut into strips), 1/2 cup

• green bell pepper (cut into strips), 1/2 cup

• ground/powdered peanuts

• usuage (thin fried tofu; cut into strips), 1/2 cup

• tamarind paste, 3 tbsp

• sugar, 5 tbsp

• soy sauce (or soy patis), 1.5 tbsp

• chili bean sauce (or chili powder/ chili flakes)

• hot water, 3 tbsp

Procedure

1. Boil water on a pot.

2. Cook rice noodles 1 minute less than the package instructions (mine gets cooked in 5 but I only cook it for 4 minutes). Stop the cooking by washing it insanely well with cool tap water. (Rice noodles don’t smell nice and it has terrible aftertaste if you don’t wash it thoroughly so this step is very important.) Set aside.

3. In a bowl, make your pad Thai sauce by mixing tamarind paste, sugar, soy sauce, chili bean paste and hot water. It would be best to pour the hot water on the sugar to melt Iran’s incorporate well in the sauce. Set aside.

4. On a pan in high heat, add a generous amount of peanut or olive oil.

5. Once the oil is hot, toss in the carrots, followed by bell pepper and/or paprika. Add ground peanuts.

6. Add in the cooked rice noodles and bean sprouts then pour the sauce.

7. Stir fry on very high heat for no more than a minute more if you want to keep the gummy texture of the noodles.

8. Top with ground peanuts, red chili flakes, celery leaves and eat happily!