Vegetarian Pad Kee Mao ~ Drunken noodles

Thai cuisine is very much similar to our Indian cuisine. When we dine out we prefer to try out different cuisines. Thai tops our list!
P loves spicy food and Thai red curry is his favorite. I have not tried making Thai food from scratch. I usually resort to pre-made pastes to satisfy our cravings.
A friend of ours introduced us to Pad Kee mao or The drunken noodles, and it was love at first bite. This became a regular while dining out until one day I decided to try it out at home. The main reason for me to try this at home was the amount of oil used in restaurants. Also being a vegetarian I was never sure of the sauces being used. Hence began my quest for the recipe. Google gave me quite a lot of recipes. I checked them all and finally when I started cooking this recipe evolved.
Feel free to play around with the sauces and veggies of your choice. I skipped tofu and baby corn in this since I did not have it in hand. Adding it would definitely elevate the dish even further.

Here is what's needed:
Sauces:
1/4 cup dark soya sauce
2 tbsp Maggi seasoning sauce
1-2 tbsp red chilli garlic paste
1 tbsp Thai peanut paste
2 tbsp Sugar

Flat Rice noodles 1/2 lb
Thai basil leaves generous fistful washed
Carrot 1 cut into julienne
Peppers colored 1 cup cut into julienne
Onion 1 thinly sliced
Spring onions 2 small bunches whites and greens separated and chopped
Mushrooms 8 chopped
Broccoli 10 florets cleaned
Garlic 8 pods finely chopped
Oil Canola or peanut to stir fry
Salt to taste

Procedure:
1) Soak the rice noodles in warm water until al-dente. The noodles should have a bite in them after being soaked else when tossed in sauce it could break and turn into gloopy mess.
2) Mix all the ingredients under sauce well. Keep aside. Keep all the sauces and veggies ready as this is to be cooked on high flame.
3) Heat a wok on high. Add oil. When the oil is hot, add in the finely chopped garlic and saute for few seconds.  Add in the sliced onions, white part of spring onions, saute. Add in rest of the veggies and tofu (if using) except the greens of spring onion. Saute until the veggies are half done. If the veggies are cooked further they would end up soggy and soft which would affect the over all taste of the final dish.
4) Add in the sauce mix and half of the basil roughly torn. Add in the soft noodles and saute. The sauce mixture already has quite a good amount of salt so watch out when adding salt. At this point do the taste test and check if it needs any seasoning. I added a little bit of chilli garlic paste at this point to notch up the spiciness.
5) Finally add in all of the basil. Give it a quick stir. Transfer the noodles to serving bowl, garnish it with spring onion greens. Enjoy!

P.S: I used regular rice noodles that we normally use for Pad thai. The freshness that Thai basil renders to this dish cannot be replaced with Italian basil.

Spicy garlicky noodles

 Indian Chinese is one the popular cuisines in India. This cuisine is our take on the Chinese cuisine. When we first moved to Shanghai my relatives had so much to question about Chinese food. Manchurian, Manchow soup etc which are easily available here was not available there. They had the notion that for me as a vegetarian eating out was easy like in Indian Chinese joints. Initially, I used to avoid going out for dinner as it was difficult to get some decent vegetarian food. Plus, I was scared of chopsticks. I did not want to use spoon and fork as it would make me the center of attraction.
One day when we had decided to go out for sightseeing on a weekend, hubby decided to teach me how to use chopsticks. Thinking that I would get some noodles I made maggi for dinner and learnt the art of using chopsticks. In my mind I had the visualized that if I order noodles I would be getting non spicy version of dry noodles but when we actually ordered it we got a huge pot of noodles with lot of soup in it. The noodles were so slippery and  the broth was so hot that I did not have the courage to dig in with chopsticks. To my bad luck I had not carried forks from home and all I had was disposable spoons. The hotel too did not have any fork. Finally I manged to drink some soup and fish out some noodles from it. And had some rice too with broccoli. I remember the experience very well as after dinner my table was completely. After some practice sessions with my hubby, now I can comfortably eat rice, vegetables, noodles and even pick groundnuts using chopsticks and also enjoy Chinese cuisine.

Noodles is one of our favorite Indo-Chinese dish. I make a spicy version of it. It can be had on its own or with some hot & sour vegetables.

Here is what's needed:

200 grams chow noodles

2 tbsp oil

3 dry red chillies - torn to bits

2 tsp red chilli powder

8 flakes of garlic finely chopped

2 tsp soya sauce

2 tsp vinegar

1 tsp Tomato ketchup

2 capsicum shredded

2 carrots shredded

1/2 cup shredded cabbage

 2 Onions sliced

small bunch of spring onions chopped (Reserve the greens for garnishing)

2 tsp pepper powder

salt to taste

Procedure:

1) Boil water in big vessel. Add noodles and cook until the noodles are just cooked through. Do not overcook as it can make the noodles mushy. Drain the noodles and rinse it with cold water. Add a tbsp of oil and keep aside to cool.

2) Prepare seasoning by heating oil. Add chopped garlic and red chilles. Cook for 1/2 minute. Add vegetables - Onions, capsicum, carrot and cabbage. Saute on high flame until done yet the vegetables are crispy  Add chilli powder, pepper powder, soya sauce, vinegar, tomato ketchup, salt. Saute for a minute.

3) Add the noodles and mix well until well incorporated and garnish with spring onion greens.

Serve hot. Wanna have some?