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?”
Michelle posted in Writing @ 6:19 am | Viewed 1022 times
Tori Lennox Says:
Did your DH survive this time around?
name Says:
I am a regular reader of your blog. I like it very much (although I do not comment too often).
Tamarind is a very common ingredient in Indian cooking as well. (BTW, I am from southern part of India.) You can buy tamarind in any Indian grocery store or in the Indian section of a big grocery store. You soak it in water for about half an hour. Then squeeze the tamarind as much as possible. After that, keep the juice and throw away the pulp, seeds. You can then use this tamarind juice for cooking. This is the traditional way to use tamarind.
But since the above procedure is too cumbersome, you can simply buy the tamarind paste. Mix it with water, then use it.
I have always found that doing it the traditional way gives much better results.
When using tamarind, you want it as fresh as possible. The older it is, the worse the food tastes. Old tamarind can also give constipation problems etc., That is another reason why I advice against using tamarind paste. The texture/color of tamarind tells how fresh the tamarind is - the redder the better, the blacker the worse.
Be careful not to use too much tamarind. While it gives good taste to the food, large quantities of using it can lead to stones in kidneys etc., Indians generally use it in plenty, but we end our food with curd/butter milk/yogurt rice which nullifies all the effects of acidic foods like spices, tamarind etc.,
hth
Michelle Says:
Thanks for the suggestions on using tamarind! I’m hoping to eventually find the right stuff.
Incidentally, the food came out great! I’ll definitely make the recipe again, though we added some chili paste to add some heat. My husband really liked it.
Amy Says:
How did they like the pad thai? It sounds delicious. My kids were very skeptical when I made PF Chang’s Vegetarian Lettuce Wraps.
Interestingly, even though we ran out of lettuce to wrap it in, they managed to eat it with rice, plain, for breakfast, for lunch….new favorite food (one they were clearly NOT going to enjoy as I was making it).