Pages

Saturday 26 January 2013

pho-less pad thai

Cooking at my house can be fraught with danger. One sweeping gesture towards an unfavourable vegetable in the crisper and J appears - wildly unimpressed and banishes me from the kitchen.

This week I negotiated permission to experiment, and old-fashioned cooking was out, and raw food was in. In theory, given this family's insatiable appetite for meat and roast veg, this was going to be risky.

On Monday, I sought a little help from the kelp noodle and prepared raw Pad Thai. Kelp noodles are a really versatile sea vegetable and flavour this dish with a wonderful crunch and refreshing tang that the classic recipe doesn't have. The rich, silky dressing is a heady mélange of ginger, garlic, chilli, lime juice and coriander seeds, mixed together with the chief ingredient of cashew nuts, and dotted with a dash of maple syrup. Bright, crunchy vegetables form the base of the dish.

I was filled with trepidation when I started to serve. I had neglected to tell James that tonight’s Pad Thai was a slight variation on the original, and his intense longing for a Pho noodle could threaten to overpower any taste sensation. We all survived though, bellies heartily bursting with raw food revolution.

No comments:

Post a Comment