Adventures in Asian Food

Some of you may know that I spent a year and a half of my life in Thailand. Okay, so I was maybe a year old at the time, but apparently when I was learning to talk, I spoke a bit of Thai. I had a Thai nanny who looked after me, so I guess it’s no surprise that I love Asian food and I enjoy a bit of spice.

Fast forward to now, when my husband and I have been searching for the perfect Thai restaurant. We love take-out, especially a nice chicken pad thai. But, now that I’ve stopped teaching and am writing full time, eating out will soon be a rare occasion instead of a weekly tradition. That said, I’m on a mission to learn to cook or re-create the fast foods that we love so much. Including take-out.

Thanks to the Internet, you can find almost any recipe. So yesterday, I embarked on my quest to find the perfect chicken pad thai recipe. My past experiences with cooking Asian food was….not so good. In fact, when we were first married, my husband nearly got his head taken off when he came home, sniffed the apartment and said, “Dear God, what’s that smell?”

Me: That would be dinner, honey.

I learned that you can’t make substitutions for the required ingredients. You have to follow the directions, or you’ll end up with a mess on your hands. Initially, I bought a prepared kit for making chicken pad thai, but in the back of my mind, I thought–you’re copping out. Make the real thing, coward! So, it was with trepidation and excitement that I went off to our local gourmet grocery store, hoping to find all of the exotic ingredients such as bean sprouts, tamarind paste, and fish sauce.

No one had heard of tamarind paste. This is a problem when you don’t have a clue what it is. Was it a fruit? Was it a sauce? It wasn’t in the Asian food aisle, nor was it in organic foods. I checked the produce aisle, which wasn’t a bad thing since I found one man who could actually tell me what it was. The tamarind is a tree that bears a fruit. You use the pulp and it adds acidity to the dish. Some people substitute lime juice with a touch of brown sugar, but it’s a very unique ingredient.

They didn’t have it. And by golly, I needed 1/4 cup of the stuff. What was I to do? My food was going to taste awful, and all because I didn’t have the dratted tamarind. I had no clue where the local Asian grocery store was, so I ended up coming back home.

Note: I made chicken fried rice for the kids. They’re not into spicy food, much less exotic dishes, thankyouverymuch.

Dejected, I began laying out the ingredients, thinking that without tamarind, this was probably going to be a travesty. But something made me stop short. Wait. I had bought a prepared kit for chicken pad thai….could it be? I grabbed the box, read the ingredients, and lo and behold! The pad thai sauce packet had tamarind in it! What do you know?

So, the angels sang, I happily made my recipe in the wok…and my husband looked up from his newspaper in the den and asked, “Honey, what’s that smell?”