finally, a pad thai worth keeping

I enjoy Thai food and have ever since we visited the King and I in Edmonton for Dan’s birthday (one of the best restaurants in Edmonton IMHO, many of the rock groups who visit Edm such as U2 order their food from it!). Finding Thai in the same level of quality here is difficult. One interesting option is Chuchai on St. Denis which offers a variety of vegetarian dishes cooked with Thai spices. Its very good and one hardly notices that the “chicken” and “duck” are actually tofu or tempeh, although the type of food is quite different from what the King and I offers.

I also make attempts at cooking simple Thai recipes at home. For a long time I have wanted to make Pad Thai, but it looked quite technically challenging and involved some ingredients I had never used before, including Tamarind. I had been using a pseudo-fusion recipe which Dan was not that keen on and had recently tried some Pad Thai sauce in a jar but found it (oddly) too sweet. And chunky. I found a relatively simple Pad Thai recipe online and gave it a try this week and it worked out very nicely. Its quite simple and undoubtedly is not the same as what people eat in Thailand, but I think its a good compromise and lightyears better than the other recipe I was using. The tricky bit was the Tamarind. The recipe originally called for “tamarind concentrate” but all I could find here was the fruit itself in a semi-dry brick. So I broke some off, mixed it with lime juice and cut into small pieces with scissors and that seemed to work very well.

Anyway, here is the recipe!

8 ounces rice noodles soaked in warm water at least 15 minutes
5-6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 tablespoons plus 1/3 cup chopped green onions (or small red or purple onions)
½ cup raw shrimp or raw chicken, cut in pieces
1/4 cup fish sauce 
1/4 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon red chilli pepper sauce
2 teaspoons tamarind mixed with 2 teaspoons lime juice and snipped with scissors
1 cup roasted peanuts, coarsely broken up. 
1 cup tofu that has been diced (1/2″ cubes), and marinated in soy sauce for approx 15 minutes
Heat cooking or soy oil in a wok and add the garlic and green onions, and briefly stir-fry until they just shows signs of changing color. At this point one option is to add chicken meat or shrimp and cook a bit longer. Add the remaining ingredients and stir-fry until the noodles soften (about 5 minutes). As you stir the noodles, periodically throw in 1-2 tablespoons of water, and after 2-3 minutes add 1 tablespoon of rinsed, salted radish (optional).
Garnish
Mix a tablespoon of lime juice with a tablespoon of snipped tamarind and a tablespoon of fish sauce, and use this to marinade 1/3 cup chopped green onions, and 1/2 cup coarsely ground roasted peanuts. Sprinkle this mixture on the cooked pad Thai. Cut several limes into segments and also slice up some cucumber into rounds then halve the rounds. Put the lime segments and cucumber segments around the serving platter.