Vegan pad thai

Kyle's menu week, day 4: Asian thing!

Looking for recipes for pad thai, I found a lot of people who said the key to it was fish sauce. And in the interest of full disclosure I do occasionally eat fish, but I don't really like thinking of myself as a pescetarian, as lame as that may be. And I guess that might be the reason I don't like using fish ingredients if I don't have to... I like to think the option to give it up is always available!

The sad fact is that I've probably never had good pad thai anyway (I always thought the key was a ton of oil and gross peanut butter sauce), so even without fish sauce this version from Andrea's easy vegan cooking pretty much knocked my socks off. Everything in it was cheap and almost everything easy to find at Henry's (save tamarind paste).

A couple of tips: cut everything up beforehand and separate it into a few batches (garlic in one, broccoli, carrot, tofu in another, tamari, syrup, red pepper flakes, shallot, and green onions in another). I've never done this before for anything, but it was absolutely necessary here -- once you start cooking it just takes a few minutes for everything to come together. Also the tamarind I found was in a gooey brick in plastic wrap, with pieces of the shell and seeds interspersed. I soaked it in warm water for a few minutes and then worked some of it through a strainer to get a paste like consistency. I would probably not recommend this method if you can avoid it