I made some Thai Drunken Noodles last night. They turned out okay, though I got my chili-and-garlic paste just a touch darker than it needed to be.
Sorry for the blurry-as-fuck photo, I was rushing around like crazy last night. Reasons for which will become clear shortly.
Anyway, the recipe’s not too hard, though it required some grocery shopping. The sauce base uses oyster sauce, Golden Mountain Soy Sauce (a lighter, sweeter sauce; Maggi is a good substitute), fish sauce, sugar, and Thai Black Soy Sauce (a very thick, dark soy sauce enriched with molasses), lending it a salty, slightly sweet, caramel-esque flavor with lots of umami. But before the sauce comes the garlic-and-chili paste–I mashed up two whole Thai chilies, a couple of big cloves of garlic, and a de-seeded red jalapeno(? they weren’t labeled at the grocery store, but basically some larger, not-as-hot red chili) in my mortar and pestle into a thick, chunky paste, then added it to a couple of tablespoons of hot oil in my wok. Threw in some sliced chicken, then sliced carrot, green and yellow bell peppers, diced onions, and snap peas, stirred it all till mostly cooked, then added in the noodles–big wide rice noodles, soaked in boiling water for 8 minutes then drained. Then in goes the sauce, along with some diced green onions and garlic chives. Once it’s all come together, remove from heat and stir in a bunch of Thai basil. Holy basil would be more authentic, but that’s hard to come by–even more than Thai basil!
It’s spicy, salty, a little sweet, with a lovely garlic undertone. I loved it.
But you see, last night, I also made my girlfriend Pad Thai (more or less from scratch, though I did have a head-start with the tamarind juice for the sauce since I got that canned rather than making it from pulp), since she was wary of the spice levels. . .
. . . and then I also made my infamous 7-cheese bacon mac n cheese and two kinds of beer bread (outlined in the beer thread: We have never talked about Beer) for a work potluck that we held today.
All told I didn’t get to bed till 1AM and I’m sore as a motherfucker today, but it was a delicious ~18 hour span :)