Thai Week: Vegan Pad Thai

Breakfast: Oatmeal with blueberries - I have to get more inventive

Lunch: Sandwich of the expensive bread (woo hoo!) with home made baba ganoush, peppers, cucumbers and salad

Dinner: Vegan Pad Thai

One of the (many) advantages of living with a total food fiend is that they’ll happily spend $6 on a gourmet loaf that you then get to eat half of because if you don’t it will go stale. I am of the opinion that $6 will get me a lot more food and that I can make bread myself, so I never quite make that investment. Never quite make the bread, either.

So you know how when you go for an Indian someone always orders a korma and everyone else rolls their eyes because that’s such an obvious choice? I feel like Pad Thai often suffers from being “the obvious choice” in a Thai restaurant too, as if it always comes at the end of an order when everyone is sharing. “We’ll get this, this and this, and yeah obviously we’ll have the Pad Thai too.”

In actuality, this just means that it’s ridiculously popular – and it’s easy to see why. No matter when you get it from, it’s always good, and the noodles themselves feel like the main taste focus rather than the meat, or lack thereof.

This Pad Thai recipe dispenses with any fish sauce or egg while retaining that familiar taste, making it suitable for vegans as well as vegetarians. Hooray!

Youll need:

(Feeds 2)

            2 small carrots, grated

            2 small onions, chopped

            100 grams tofu, fried in chunks

            1 large tomato, chopped

            2 spring onions, chopped

            1 large handful of beansprouts

2 nests of flat noodles, ready cooked (boil for 5 mins then drain and rinse with cold water)

3 cloves garlic, crushed

            2 tsp brown sugar

            1 tbsp lime juice

            2 tbsp soy sauce

            chili flakes

            extra lime to garnish

sunflower oil / extra virgin olive oil

Method:

            Fry the onion, carrots and garlic in the oil til the onion is starting to brown

            Add the tofu, tomato and noodles

            Mix well and add the soy sauce and sugar

            Add lime juice, a sprinkling of chili flakes, spring onion and beansprouts

            Serve with crushed peanuts, another sprinkling of chili flakes and half a lime

           

You can easily roast the peanuts yourself by laying them on a baking tray and putting them in a 150 degree oven for 5 to 10 minutes, then crushing them after they’ve cooled. Keep an eye on them though as they do love to burn.

This feels a bit like cheating because it’s so easy to make and yet so amazing tasting, but there are no cheats involved. If you like you can grow your own tomatoes, just so you feel like you’ve put enough effort in to deserve the final reward.