K and I have been each taking one kid a night each week for “special time.” Which means the photo above is of my son and I spending a full night together, cooking and watching Thor Ragnarok and reading. It’s lovely.
I am craving Thai food in a big, big way these days. Pad See Ew, specifically – it’s one of my favorite dishes on the planet. But there’s only one Thai restaurant nearby(ish) to me, and nearby(ish) means a 15 minute drive each way, and I do not have that kind of time (or, frankly, the funds for the volume of Pad See Ew that I would really like to eat; my kids consume SO MUCH FOOD that every time I get takeout the bill hovers around $60, nope nope nope).
But! I have discovered that this particular dish is quite replicate-able at home, thanks to my lovely friend Skyler Bouchard of Dining With Skyler, whose recipes are some of my all-time Internet favorites (besides the fact that she’s adorable and just so much fun to follow on IG).
Apologies for the iPhone photos of my food taken moments before I ate it. Remember when I used to style my food posts with, like, backdrops? And lighting? And props?!?! Ugh, I used to be such a hardworking little blogger. Ah well. #ch-ch-changes
(Isn’t it kinda nice to see what food *actually* looks like, though? Like, the way you can expect it to look when you make it yourself?)
Note: I made this Pad See Ew with egg noodles, because my store was out of rice noodles. I don’t necessarily *recommend* this – because rice noodles do give you that lovely, sticky, light texture that you want with this dish, but whatever: they also worked just fine in a pinch.
Look at that knife work!
PAD SEE EW(ISH) WITH CHICKEN AND ASPARAGUS, adapted from withskyler.com (I added chicken to her recipe, and changed a few of the seasoning proportions to suit my particular tastes, which tend towards the garlicky and salty, but definitely click over to her OG recipe for some really great ideas and variations)
What You Need:
- 1 package rice noodles (again, I used egg noodles because my store was out of rice, so you do you)
- 1 package chicken cutlets
- 1 bunch skinny asparagus, stems trimmed and cut into 1″ pieces
- 3 eggs, lightly beaten
- Garlic powder
- Salt & pepper
For Sauce:
- 5 tbsp soy sauce
- 3 tbsp oyster sauce
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1 tbsp rice vinegar (if you only have white wine vinegar, that works fine, too)
- 1 tsp fish sauce
What You Do:
In a small bowl, mix together all the sauce ingredients. Taste it, and adjust to your liking (maybe a little more soy sauce? A little more sugar?! It’s all delicious stuff).
Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Cook your noodles according to package directions. Drain and set aside.
While the water is coming to a boil, cut up the chicken into 1″ pieces. Season generously with salt, pepper, and garlic powder (ooooh I love me some garlic powder and I’m not sorry about it). Heat a little olive oil in your pan, and cook the chicken, stirring frequently, until cooked through. Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside.
Season the asparagus pieces with salt, pepper and (more!) garlic powder. In the same pan you used to cook the chicken, add a little more olive oil and cook the asparagus until bright-green and tender, about 3 minutes.
Push the asparagus off to one side and toss in the eggs (need more oil first?! Do it) and cook, stirring frequently, until scrambled.
Add the cooked noodles and chicken to the pan, then pour over the sauce and toss vigorously until well combined.
Note: I ended up leaving out some of the noodles so that I’d have a higher veggie/chicken-to-noodle ratio, so the next day I just whipped up another batch of sauce, returned the extra noodles to the pan with the leftovers from the night before, and voila: Lunch.
