Vegetables of choice, I used green pepper, red onion, spring onion and chinese cabbage – see notes
3-5 tbsp of peanuts, toasted
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 eggs
Sauce
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp brown sugar – see ntoes
2 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tsp dark soy sauce
2 tsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp ketchup – see notes, honest
Topping
Fresh red chillies, sliced
Lime
More nuts
Coriander
Steps
Combine all your sauce ingredients and set aside
Prepare your noodles, as always cook them for 1 minute less than the packet says
Prepare your protein and veg
Crack egg and whisk
Now you're all prepped, it's time to heat your wok
I prefer to cook this kind of thing one stage at a time and combine at the end so:
Heat oil in a wok and then flash cook your protein – if using
Remove from the wok and throw in your veg, add extra oil if you need to
Remove those from the wok and add your noodles
Let the noodles get some colour if you can
Add garlic and flash fry until mostly done
Push the garlicky noodles to the side and in the open space tip in your eggs, scramble them, don;t worry if they stick just scrape it up for tasty brown bits
Add vegetables and protein and nuts
Finally add the sauce – see notes
Serve and slurp
Tips
On ketchup: Ketchup is what you'd find in recipes made by people who aren't from Thailand, think that restaurant you know ISN'T authentic, but you love it. Really you should be using tamarind but I don't think it's a particularly economical ingredient to have. So this is a "cheats" version that tastes pretty damn good.
On vegetables: An 'authentic' pad thai is probably going to have beansprouts and chinese chives as it's only real veg, but that is what you'd have in a restaurant... all noddle dishes are vehicles for what you have lying around. I'm almost certain of it.
On sugar: use palm sugar if you have it, but brown sugar works.
On adding sauce: if you fancy, pour the sauce in the same manner as the eggs (not at the same time, pervert) this will let it caramelise a little bit.
