Comments (13)

By kilax, September 10, 2009 10:57 pm

Steven has finally perfected his pad siew recipe (the one I mentioned here) and is ready to share it!

Required Ingredients:

Required sauce ingredients (please note, that green top is NOT the top that comes on the sauce bottle – it is a wine topper someone gave us for our wedding).

Our preferred brands for baby corn and water chestnuts.

• 1 box lasagna pasta noodles (We use Barilla wavy lasagne. If you are adventurous, you can try the actual Thai noodles – good luck. That didn’t work too well for us – we don’t have a wok.)
• 1 large carrot
• 3  cups fresh broccoli florets (or a 16 oz bag of frozen florets) (The broccoli soaks up the sauce and tastes wonderful. Just be careful you don’t use too much or it will absorb all the sauce and make the dish bland.)
• 8 oz. sliced water chestnuts
  
• 15 oz. baby corn
• 1 cup spinach (just grab a handful – it’s good for you and can’t ruin the dish)
  
• 4 tbsp. vegetable oil (for stir frying)
  
• Tofu, OR 6 eggs, OR your preferred protein (We like Morningstar Steak Strips (which are now discontinued!), and Heartline Meatless Meats.)
• Vegetable oil for frying tofu (1/4″ – 1/2″ in a frying pan)

Sauce (double this if you are making marinated tofu):

• 2/3 cup sweet soy sauce (We have to go to a special part of Chicago to buy the kind we use. It’s thick and syrupy. This is really what makes the dish. If you can’t find this, you can use regular sauce and add lots of sugar, but it won’t be the same.)
• 1/3 cup Kimlan soy sauce (Any brand will work for this but Kimlan is our favorite – more flavor less salt.  Kikoman is also pretty good.)
  
• 1 tbsp. garlic powder
• 1/4 tsp. ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper (add to taste)
• 1 tbsp. white sugar

This was Steven’s first time cooking with tofu! Can you believe it? A vegetarian and vegan who have never cooked tofu?!

Well, because of this, we don’t know much about tofu and followed the instructions here. Like I mentioned in the ingredients list above though, you can use a lot of other things instead of tofu.

Extra firm tofu.

We bought the extra firm tofu (winky wink). You drain the liquid out of the tofu, put it on paper towels, and put a heavy pan filled with water on top of it to squish the water out of it. This process takes about 30 minutes, and you have to change the paper towels often, and watch the tofu to make sure it settles straight (to keep the pan from falling over).

Squishing the water out of the tofu.

After you have squished all of the water out of the tofu, you cut it into the size of chunks you want (we cut ours into roughly 1-inch x 1-inch cubes). Tofu doesn’t really taste like anything, so you can fry it like it is, or marinate it. The longer you marinate it, the more flavor it absorbs. For this recipe, you marinate it for about an hour in a bowl filled with the sauce recipe x2.

When you get the water boiling for the noodles, we usually put some soy sauce and crushed red pepper into the noodle water to add a bit of flavor to it (mostly just a nice aroma). It’s important that the noodles are cooked al dente, because they cook a bit longer later in the recipe.

While the pasta is boiling, you cut up all of the broccoli, chop the carrots, and open the cans of baby corn and water chestnuts. You should remove the tofu from the marinade at this point so you can use the remaining sauce (hopefully 1 cup or more!) for the main dish.

Once the pasta is ready (al dente!), you drain it, and rinse it briefly with cool water so you can handle it. You stack all of the noodles on top of one another (resist eating too many!), and cut them into three strips lengthwise, and down the middle (see below).

I always want to eat the noodles at this point.

Put 4 tablespoons of oil into the empty pasta pot, and stir fry the broccoli and carrots on high heat. The trick is to keep the veggies moving around.  After a few brief minutes (you just want to sear the outside of the veggies), add the spinach and stir it around until it has shriveled up.  Finally add the baby corn, water chestnuts, the sauce, and the noodles.

Stir it around to get the sauce on everything, then cover the pot with a lid.  Turn the heat down to low and cook for 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally, to soak up all the tasty sauce. This is a good time to make Trader Joe’s egg rolls or pot stickers (which are vegan!), and scramble some eggs or fry your tofu.

To fry the tofu, put about 1/4″ to 1/2″ of of oil in a pan on medium high. If the oil gets too hot, it will burn the tofu. The tofu cooks quickly, about 1 minute on each side. You need to drain the oil off of the tofu when it’s done, but paper towel seems to stick (perhaps a metal colander or frying mesh skimmer would work better).  If you are going the egg route, scramble the eggs  in a stick free skillet with a little vegetable oil (probably about 1 tablespoon), then add the scrambled eggs to the pot with the rest of the ingredients.

Marinated and fried tofu. Nom de nom.

We put the dish into bowls and added the tofu on top.

The finished product!

This is the kind of dish you want to make a lot of because it makes wonderful leftovers! As it sits in the fridge it just gets better and better. Perfect for taking a few bites of cold when you get home for work, or taking for lunch, then eating again for dinner (guilty of doing all three today!).

This dish takes about 1 hour to make from start to finish (not counting the tofu draining and marinating steps).

Let me know if you try it. Or if my instructions don’t make sense.

Comments (15)

By kilax, April 11, 2009 7:11 am

4/10/09 Version of our homemade Pad Siew

You’d think a spouse that had Friday off and stayed at home all day (and took a 3 hour nap!) would have dinner ready when their spouse came home. Oops, not THIS wife!

Steven asked me to cook Pad Siew while he ran, and I gave him a really pained look. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to cook it, just that I was nervous about it. Steven’s the Chef, I’m only the Sous Chef. My responsibilities in the kitchen include baking, cleaning up, washing dishes, and chopping vegetables. Asking me to make this dish was a big step… for me. I guess I should consider it an honor!

Steven gave me very specific instructions then went up for his run…

A bit of history on this dish: In winter of 2008, I went to a Thai restaurant (with a buddy) for the first time and randomly selected Pad Siew, a dish with chewy noodles, sweet soy sauce, broccoli, egg and sometimes tofu (or meat). I was instantly hooked on the dish and introduced it to Steven, who also loved it… but wanted to try and make it at home. So I talked to a coworker from Thailand about the dish, and he hooked me up with the key ingredients. Steven kept making the modified recipe (we add more veggies) over and over and over until he got it very close to perfection. Steven’s still working on it though! I like to consider this one of our “signature” dishes – we like to share it with friends and family, usually with egg rolls or pot stickers – but it’s different every time we make it! The last time we made it for kapgar, tori and diane, I asked Steven to leave out the crushed red pepper, and oops, it was so bland, we discovered that IS one of the key ingredients. Sorry guys!

So I took a lot of photos while I was making it all by myself last night, hoping to share the recipe and step by step with you guys! But when Steven came down after his run, he had to do a little “re-seasoning.” He said, “Re-seasoning is when you season it the first time then tweak it in the end!” (I think he was trying to make me feel better)

So it turned out good, but he doesn’t want me to share his recipe until it is perfecto! Should I share it then? Does it look like something you’d like?

Simmering on the stove…

I look funny – my face felt sore all day Friday, especially when I was eating dinner.

I am a stickler about eating at the dining room table, but we almost always eat this dish on the couch, while watching a movie. The perfect Friday night!

Just a little question – when I write about cooking/baking, do you think it makes sense to go into the “Health + Fitness” category? I don’t think I cook/bake enough to have a “recipe” or “food” category… Steven does though! I’ve added a poll below if you’d like to leave input!

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