Time For Something New

When you're tired after a long day, it's so easy to stay in a food rut and eat the same thing you always do when you're exhausted.  In my case, that's either a bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough or take out from a Thai restaurant.  I've been trying to eat better since the beginning of October and I've actually been doing a pretty good job.  It was easy to stop ordering take out when I was tired, but a little more difficult to break the habit of eating something sweet.  Things are slowly progressing, for which my digestive system seems to be grateful.

But I really miss Thai food.  It is so good - spicy and savory and the tastes combine perfectly with the textures of the ingredients.  Although I can't eat the really spicy dishes anymore, like papaya salad, I can still have the savory ones.  Several weeks ago I decided it was time to try making my favorite at home: pad see ew.

Of course it turned out that pad see ew is one of those dishes that you really can't recreate exactly at home.  You need a well-seasoned wok with an industrial strength stove to get restaurant-style pad see ew.  Most of the Thai cooking blogs I looked at said that you can do a pretty good approximation at home if you're patient.  I was pretty nervous about trying to make pad see ew after reading all of this, and I figured that I'd give it a try and it would be terrible and that would be that.

Unexpectedly, pad see ew is really easy to make at home.  The blogs are right - the taste isn't exactly the same without the high heat but it's definitely edible and tastes similar to a restaurant's version. 

Restaurant-style pad see ew: my version got pretty close.