What's Cooking Wednesday | Shrimp Pad Thai

This week's What's Cooking Wednesday is brought to you by Steph at The Kat Almanac.  Enjoy!

So you know that the Stay at Home Attorney and I have started this weekly cooking series. Each week we will trade off sharing recipes. It is my turn this week. And now I have stage fright. I don’t know why. I have posted recipes here before. But now that it is a “thing”, I can’t decide what to post! I make this shrimp pad thai and its good. I know its good. Big Kat requests it all the time. So why am I being a baby about it? Eh, who knows! First time jitters maybe?? I should mention though that the SAHA is the photographer amongst the two of us and my pictures will be taken in the evening with a dirty cutting board, with about 10 pots on the stove and a baby hanging on my leg. So if you are looking for food porn, please go elsewhere.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way: shrimp pad thai! I do a lot of Asian cooking because I find that it lends itself easily to gluten free cooking. Did I mention I’m GF? Well there. I am. Anywho, this recipe is adapted from the Whole Foods Cookbook (Petusevsky. New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2002). <------- Yes I did just throw up a citation for you. I couldn’t find a web source for the cookbook and I’m a stickler for a source so there you go. Once a historian always a historian people!

Ingredients

1 box of rice noodles (I used a rice spaghetti that was on sale)
1/4 cup canola oil
3 cloves of garlic minced (or 1 1/2 tsp)
2 tsp of red chili paste
1 tsp sugar
3 tbsp fish sauce
1/4 cup water
1 egg
1/4 cup scallions (I didn’t have any so I omitted them)
1/2 cup snow peas julienned (again, no snow peas in my arsenal so skipped these too)
1 1/2 cup bean sprouts (Ok. You caught me. I didn’t want any veggies tonight so no sprouts either)
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 pound of shrimp (if you don’t have shrimp, you can really substitute any kind of protein: chicken, beef, tofu)
1/2 cup chopped peanuts

Put your water on to boil for the rice noodles. When the water comes to a boil, add noodles and cook till water just returns to a boil. Remove noodles and run under cold water and set aside.

 

 

Meanwhile, heat canola oil in a wok or large saute pan. Combine garlic, chili paste, sugar, fish sauce and water.

 

Cook together for about 5 minutes. Sauce will slightly thicken. Beat the egg then add to the mixture and stir constantly until eggs are soft set.

 

When the sauce is thickened, add your shrimp.

 

Cook for 2 minutes and then add the noodles, toss and saute for 5 minutes.

 

If you are cool and like to eat your veggies, you may add the scallions, snow peas and bean sprouts now. Also, kick in those red pepper flakes and lemon juice. Heat through for about 2 or 3 minutes.

Garnish with peanuts.

There you go. One of my favorite quick, go to meals.