In order to combat the mundanity of our weekly menu planning, we decided to challenge ourselves to see if we could cook Thai food each night for a week. I know, it might sound a bit strange to combat mundanity with a menu entirely of one country, but we love Thai food and were curious to see how the week would go. So let's get started, beginning with dinner last night.
Pad Thai
We've been making this dish since we first got married. I was introduced to this dish at a number of fantastic Thai restaurants in Bellingham while I lived there during undergrad. I lived in an apartment for two years just down the street from a restaurant called Busara. Being a college student living with two other guys, we tended to enjoy not cooking as much as anybody else. In the years since, I've always used Pad Thai as a metric for how much I like any Thai restaurant. Fortunately, the closest restaurant to our current home in Nashville serves a fantastic Pad Thai! As we've mentioned before on this blog, we really enjoy trying to recreate our favorite restaurant dishes at home. So yesterday, we whipped up another batch of our favorite noodle dish.
We got our recipe from the 1,000+ page cookbook called The New Best Recipe from the Editors of Cooks Illustrated. Yes. You want to click the link and buy the book. Best $20 you can spend for your kitchen. It's perhaps best described as a modern-day Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. Not in the sense of being a complete work of one country's food, but in the astonishing thoroughness of the recipes. They don't just provide a recipe and instructions for Pasta with Bolognese Sauce. No. They write 4 pages on their experiences making the dish with celery, onion, and carrot, and then describe the issues with including celery. Then they describe the flavor without including celery. Painstaking, much? The front cover boasts that they made 38 versions of creme caramel in order to find the best one! Julia Child was of the same caliber of dedication in the name of best serving the home cook. Love it! The first two sentences of the Pad Thai recipe are "Pad Thai is a remedy for a dead, jaded palate. Hot, sweet, and pungent Thai flavors tangled in an un-Western jumble of textures awaken all of the senses that have grown weary of the usual grub." So true!
We've made their recipe several times and have adjusted it over time for our tastes. Here's what we include:
Onion (or shallot)
minced garlic
medium rice noodles
chicken (seasoned with salt and pepper, diced)
egg
pad thai sauce (or tamarind sauce)
rice vinegar
fish sauce
brown or palm sugar
crushed peanuts
bean sprouts
lime juice
And here's what it looks like!
YUM
Keeping things moving, tonight (Monday) we made Thai chicken pizza. This recipe comes from Pioneer Woman and I don't think we've changed anything on it yet. The interesting thing about this recipe is that we successfully made our own peanut sauce for the first time this week! We've tried to make peanut sauce before from a few different recipes online and they were all awful. They just tasted like peanut butter, and lacked the wonderful richness of the stuff we get at our Thai restaurant down the road, Golden Thai. There's a lady at the restaurant that knows if Heather walks in without me, she's there to buy a small container of peanut sauce. "Why don't you just make it at home?" she asks. "It's really easy!" Look lady, we'd tried it. It didn't work. We want to give you money for yours. K? Thanks. :)
Gone are those days because Heather found this recipe on Pinterest and we decided to give it a try. Here's what's included in the peanut sauce, plus sesame oil:
Gotta be one of the most wonderful sauces we know! And after a slight adjustment (less ginger, add cayenne pepper, slightly more coconut milk, slightly less peanut butter) it should be exactly the same as at the restaurant.
We made the peanut sauce, in part, for tonight's pizza and also as a dip for a dish later in the week.
For the pizza, we use a store bought pizza dough. After pre-baking it, we cover it in a thin layer of sweet chili sauce. Mozzarella cheese and diced chicken go on top and the pizza is baked the rest of the way. We buy many these ingredients like the coconut milk, sweet chili sauce, fish sauce, pad thai sauce, and noodles at a local Asian grocery store called K&S on Charlotte Pike. It's fantastic!! Buying products there definitely helps get you closer to the authentic flavors of the restaurant.
After topping it off with bean sprouts, carrot, cilantro, and a drizzle of peanut sauce, it's ready!
YUM again
So we're two days in and still loving Thai food! We'll be back in a day or two with a couple more dishes!
