Mannu's Blog: Healthy Bite: 13 - Veggie Pad/Phat Thai

Thai and Chinese cuisines are my husband’s favorite. So I often try to get my hands on these and learn more about them. This is my first hands on a Thai dish. Pad/Phat Thai recipe is a dish of stir-fried rice noodles with eggs, fish sauce, tamarind juice, red chili pepper, plus any combination of bean sprouts, shrimp, chicken, or tofu, garnished with crushed peanuts, coriander and lime. Variations: You can have numerus healthy variations - Baby corns, finely chopped Carrots, Bell Peppers, Firm Tofu, Broccoli, Shrimps and Chicken.

Considering all the ingredients for this dish together and dividing it by 4, it is of 240 Calories. However, when the same is ordered from restaurant, it can have 800 Calories that’s because of the typical larger servings, more of oil, seasonings including salt in order to make the food more appealing.

So, once I had eye on my husband ordering and loving it. I understood it was time for me to learn for his good health. Make him fall in love with the homemade one. That would also make me happier on curbing those extra 500ish calories J.

Well then, here it is. It was too late for me to thaw chicken hence I made it a veggie recipe. It’s one of the simpler and quicker recipes to make.

You will need:

- Thin Thai-style Rice Noodles

- 2 Eggs – Optional

- Finely chopped Veggies of your choice – I had cabbage, bean sprouts, celery, chillies, minced garlic and spring onions.

- Sauce: ¾ Tbsp. of Tamarind Paste, Ranging from 2-3 Tbsp. of Fish sauce, Chili Sauce and brown sugar (as per your flavor)

- For garnishing - Cilantro, well fried peanuts and lime.

However, I opted to buy the ready-made sauce from the market as I am not great fan of tamarind and I was missing the same in my kitchen. However, if you are interested to make the sauce at home here’s the procedure:

Sauce:

To make the Pad Thai sauce, begin with Tamarind paste. Add ¼ cup of water until the paste dissolves well in the water. Followed by adding Fish sauce and red chili sauce depending how spicy you like and 2 ½ to 3Tbsp. of brown sugar to balance the sourness and tamarind paste.

Noodles:

Step1 – Soak the noodles – Get a pot of water boiling, remove it from heat and soak rice noodles, allow it to sit until you make other ingredients.

Step 2- Have a handful of peanuts fried and set aside.

Step 3 – Stir Fry all the veggies until brown (here you can also add well whisked eggs). The whole stir frying would make the eggs scrambled and well sorted. Also, check the noodles that the texture is soft yet little firmness persists.

Here's the pic of stir frying veggies. I know there's hardly any oil. I guess that's beauty of stir fry.