March 23, 2012

Pad Thai

It’s Pad Thai night. The one night a week, when the older kids are at their dad’s and I don’t have dance class and we only have to contend with one picky kid’s appetite. I love Pad Thai night. I also eat too much on Pad Thai night.

I’ve had to modify my Pad Thai recipe a bit to make it vegetarian – factoring out pork and any fish products. And it’s also a nice dish to serve to people who can’t tolerate gluten. And especially if you know any of those who are also vegetarian.

So here it is in case you need it:

Pad Thai

2 tbsp oil (usu. canola or other vegetable oil)
350g pkg firm tofu crumbled/finely chopped (you can cut this to half a package depending on how much you want)
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
250g (8oz) dry rice noodles
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes or 2 tsp chopped red chilli (optional if you’re dining with a 4 year old)
1/2 cup chives, chopped

2 Tbsp lime juice
1 Tbsp peanut oil
1 Tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp brown sugar
2 eggs, beaten

To Serve:
1 cup bean sprouts
1/4 cup chopped peanuts
crisp-fried onions
soft brown sugar
lime wedges or lime juice

Fry your topping onions before you start the rest of this. For this amount, I usually thinly slice and fry up two large onions.

Set the noodles to soak in hot water (~10 minutes)

Heat the oil in a wok or large frying pan. When the oil is very hot, add garlic and tofu and cook stirring occasionally for 5 minutes. While these are cooking, mix the lime juice, peanut oil, soy sauce, brown sugar and eggs in a bowl and whisk until combined. Stir in the chilli and chives.

Drain the noodles and add them to the frying pan, stir then cover and cook another minute.

Pour the egg mixture over the noodles. Toss well with tongs or 2 wooden spoons until heated through.

Sprinkle bean sprouts over and serve with your choice of toppings.

* * *

Today was a gloomy day. No real sun at all. If this vitamin D thing of mine continues, soon I’m going to turn into another boring sun worshipper who mopes about the weather whenever it’s cloudy. Haha, not true. I’m still excited for all the great rainy days we’re going to have when it’s summer for real – I’m just so done with Early-Spring-Grey. You know, the days when the clouds just hang there all day and nothing ever warms up or feels lifelike. I’m done with still having snow in the North shadows of buildings.

So I didn’t get my sunshine fix today. But I still took my supplements. I still think it’s making a difference. I was pretty cheerful with Hannah’s interruptions and I also got some pretty good work done. Not that many of you will care about my silly buzzwords, but I have my local testing server set up the way I want, I have my framework installed and working, I have my database working, my ORM installed and accessible from my framework as well as its command-line-interface using the same configuration as it uses through the framework. Yeah! Now I (finally) get to get on with database design and fuh-realz programming.

When you mostly work on big projects or projects that are a site-specific implementation of a big project, you don’t get a lot of chances to start projects from scratch. It’s funny because I’ve done really quite large-scale app work and I’ve done quite in-depth application design, buuuut, I don’t know if I’ve ever started a large-scale application from scratch on my own. It’s bizarrely daunting given that in two weeks I’ll be so past this part and I’ll have a big enough code base that I’ll be back in my comfort zone.

Meanwhile it’s the weekend, so I probably won’t actually pick up programming until Monday because we have a massive list of projects and maintenance tasks for around the house. Carrying on with this floor-scrubbing thing, I’m intending to actually do a significant amount of spring cleaning this year. That fatigue hit me almost as soon as we’d moved into this house and so I feel like I never hit my stride at managing it.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure this floor hasn’t been deeply cleaned since it was installed 30 years ago. And the floor-scrubbing has been very satisfying because it’s making a big difference – but I do still have an awful lot of floor to get through. Our entire main floor is hardwood and my industrious two nights this week got me through the dining room and half the kitchen. I still have the rest of the kitchen, the breakfast nook & sunroom (really the same room, but expansive enough that I want to break them up into smaller tasks), and the livingroom. So you may get a lot of “did more scrubbing” and “mooooore scrubbing” and “hardwood floors sure are fascinating on a micro level” kind of blog posts for a long time here.

I guess we’re turning away from the fun things like putting moldings around doors and shelves up in the kitchen for a while. Ian is going to focus on finishing the stairs. That’s just a lot of little things – we still haven’t built the bottom stair because we were going to need a newel post and the bottom stair was going to have to wrap around it and we weren’t sure by how much but before we can build it anyway we need to move one of the floor beams back by a foot which means we need to put bracing posts up where we’re going to cut it and which also means we’re going to have to reroute one of the heating ducts. So ducts, beam, posts, newel post, bottom stair, railing. I think that’s it.

I love home ownership.

And I especially love old houses.

Oh yes, I found a nice “before” shot of our basement stairwell. So before we move on to un-fun projects, I’m going to take the opportunity to close this one off by bragging it up proper.

The before pic goes back to when we were buying the house, so it has the added bonus of also featuring the previous home-owners’ big rooster (tee-hee-hee) collection.