Cooking Adventures: Clafoutis and Pad Thai

You'll notice there is actually no picture of a finished pad thai. And I had what I thought was a good reason for that.


You see, those lovely ingredients for pad thai made a lovely, tasty pad thai. But the pad thai that it made was, um, pretty uniform in color (read: bland looking.) In my defense, Alton Brown's pic isn't really that much better than mine would have been. Pad Thai, people: it's a beast to photograph.

Helpful Hints: Pad Thai

You know that saying how you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover? This pad thai is a perfect example: it just doesn't look that impressive, but it's hot-smokin' awesome. Really, people. The tamarind paste killed it.

If you've never used tamarind paste and/or concentrate before, it will open up new horizons. It's a sweet-sour substance derived from the pod of the a tamarind tree. Or so wiki tells me. (Also, brownie point fact for all you teacher's pets out there: it's sometimes used as a laxative. Teeheehee.)

Now, I imagine that you, like me, are reading the list of ingredients going "Whaaa??? I don't even know where to buy half these things." To which I can safely reply, "You don't have to."

For instance, the only specialty items I bought were fish sauce, stick noodles and the tamarind concentrate. I substituted things and ended up having most of the ingredients already in me kitchen. (That's not a typo. I write like a pirate sometimes. Fair warning, y'all.)

A word on tamarind concentrate vs. tamarind paste. I bought tamarind concentrate which ended up being a soupy, not so very concentrated dosage of tamarind. I imagine tamarind paste is less liquid-y. Be advised when shopping that both will work, but that you will need to add more of the tamarind concentrate.

For the rest of the ingredients, I used pretty normal ingredients. I bought frozen shrimp, regular ole cabbage, and bean sprouts. I used canola oil in place of peanut oil. My grocery store was out of tofu, so the decision whether to get it was kind of made for me (I need more of those in my life. Can I get an amen?). I used brown sugar instead of palm sugar, and red pepper flakes for red chili peppers.

And after all these substitutions, guess what? It tasted very close to what I've had in restaurants.

The one thing I'd recommend is to taste as you go. I ended up adding more tamarind concentrate and fish sauce at the end to amp up the flavor.

Helpful Hints: Clafouti

Clafouti is traditionally a moist French dessert. I used this recipe, and found it just slightly too eggy for my taste, but still delicious. It's essentially a peasant dessert made of eggs, flour, a bit of fat, a bit of dairy, and whatever leftover fruit you have. Being a peasant dessert, it appears there's not particularly any hard and fast rules regarding whether it should be more egg-y or more cake-y. The choice is entirely up to you. Simply add a bit of flour and make it more cake-y and less egg-y.

Now apparently, clafoutis is supposed to be a dessert. To me, it wasn't sweet enough to be a dessert . . . probably because I had not put confectioner's sugar on top after baking. I ate it for breakfast several days in a row, and didn't feel like there was anything wrong with that. In fact, I felt pretty awesome. So, personally, I think if you want to eat it for breakfast, you should. Then you can feel awesome, too!

So, there's two huge pluses for this dessert: it uses up fruit that is about to go bad, or is slightly spoiled, and it uses ingredients most people have lying around the kitchen.

Now, for a few hints about the recipe. The recipe calls for 1 1/2 lbs. of cherries. I don't know about you, but if I have that many perfectly fine cherries sitting around my house, I'm not going to bake them in something. I'm going to eat them. I halved this recipe and used less than 3/4 lbs of slightly spoiled cherries. I imagine you could use a variety of fruit: berries, pieces of peaches, apricots, etc. This recipe is pretty forgiving, so feel free to experiment with the fruit ratio based on your own personal taste and ingredient availability.

Also, you can substitute vanilla extract for the vanilla bean. I think I ended up using something like a teaspoon of vanilla extract (remember, I halved the recipe). I didn't use kirsch because I had no idea what it was and certainly had never bought it. As mentioned above, I also didn't use confectioner's sugar, either. I halved my pitted cherries because it just felt like the right thing to do. Follow your kitchen instincts, m'dears!

Have a great weekend y'all! Get in the kitchen and make some food and some memories!