Pad Thai
I noticed that supermarkets have started selling squidgy packets of ready-to-cook pad thai noodles - ie the flat rice noodles used in Thai and Vietnamese cooking. Here's what I've been doing with them:
First, make some very thin omlettes. In a large frying pan/ skillet...lightly oil...pour in the beaten egg and make sure it coats the whole thing...cook, flip, cook, out. You need two or three for two people. Stack them one on top of another. Roll them up together. Then slice into 0.5cm strips. Et viola. You have 'egg strips'.
Next, get some stir frying shit together. It doesn't really matter what - one of those supermarket beansprouts+ combos will do fine (although usually like to make sure it has stuff like baby corn, sugarsnaps/mangtouts (mangetous?) and chinese cabbage). Stick it to one side a minute...
Heat your wok up nice and smokin', with a little oil. First throw in some salt and some shredded ginger. Then some sliced shitake mushrooms. I like these when they're fried intensely and start to brown - ot develops their flavour. Then throw in a thinly-sliced red chilli or two. Now the stir-fry veg. Again - intensity is the key with beansprouts. At around this time, add more shredded ginger and lotsandlots of thinly-sliced garlic (about 4 cloves). Keep on stirring and add some soy sauce - the sweet kind is best (eg ketjap manis) and (optionally) a sprinkle of the dreaded 'Flavour Powder'.
Next, toss in your eggs strips and noodles and throw it all around.
Finally...and this is The Big Important Trick...this blog talks a lot about the central role of 'shrubbery' in Vietnamese food. He's spot on! The secret is to throw in, at the very last minute before serving, great big handfuls of slightly-chopped coriander, basil and mint. How much? Take more than you'd think, then double it.
Serve garnished with lots of wedges of lime.
I can't think of an Italic bit at the end today, so I'll just shut up.
No I won't. Having nothing to say has never stopped me before. I've been reading 'Fermat's Last Theorem' by Simon Singh, so I'll tell you about The Catalogue Paradox:
A librarian is re-cataloguing all the books in the library. At the
end, he's left with a pile of catalogues, so he starts to catalogue them.
He notices that they can be subdivided into two types: thosen that list
themselves within their pages and those that don't. So he lists the first
lot and makes a catalog of them. Then he does the second lot...but he has
a problem. Should his 'Catalogue Of All The Catalogues That Don't List
Themselves' also list itself? If it doesn't, it's incomplete.
But...if it does...then obviously it's a catalogue that does list
itself, so by definition it shouldn't be listed. On the other hand...
My brain hurts.
