Pad Thai

I bought some tamarind paste on a whim from a delicatessen the other day because I know, having made some Thai food before, that it is quite hard to come by.  Pad Thai is a dish that I really like and have eaten a few times before but I have only ever made it using a bought sauce before.  This time I thought I would be adventurous and make it from scratch.  It requires quite a lot of ingredients and is not the cheapest meal to make, which may be slightly off-putting, but it is definitely worth it.  I don't want to blow my own trumpet but this is the best Pad Thai I have ever tasted, it is really very tasty.

Ingredients in order of use:
1 Tablespoon tamarind paste
3 Tablespoons brown sugar
2 Tablespoons fish sauce
1/4 Cup of hot water
2 Tablespoons oil
1 Shallot
4 Garlic cloves
1 Red chili
1 Small punnet of ready cooked prawns
2 Portions of straight-to-wok Thai ribbon noodles
1 Egg
A large handful of beansprouts
1/4 Cup of dry roasted peanuts, ground
A small bunch fresh coriander, chopped
2 Spring onions, sliced
1/4 Teaspoon of white pepper

Method:

• Make the sauce by mixing together the tamarind paste, sugar, water and fish sauce
• Heat the oil in a wok and fry the finely chopped shallot, garlic and chili
• Add the prawns and fry for a minute
• Add the noodles and crack the egg on top then stir in
• Pour over the sauce which you made previously
• Add the beansprouts and cook for a minute or two
• Add the coriander, spring onions, peanuts and white pepper and stir in then take off the heat

This recipe, despite having a lot of ingredients, is actually quite simple to make, it is mostly like a normal stir fry, the only off-putting part is making the sauce because the tamarind paste is very lumpy, I just mashed it in as much as possible and didn't pour the lumps into the pan.  I was also concerned by the fish sauce because I had never used it before and when I poured it out it smelled very strongly of bad feet but if you can put up with that then it is definitely worth it for the flavour.
This is a fairly mild recipe because I like my food quite mild, if you want to add a bit of spice, put half a teaspoon of chili flakes in the sauce at the beginning.

Sweet Potato and Salmon Fishcakes

These fishcakes are really delicious, provided you like salmon, sweet potato and fishcakes.  I made them with the help of my current kitchen assistant Mark and it was the first time we had ever tried to make them and they were actually a lot easier than we had thought they would be.

We used:

2 sweet potatoes

2 fresh salmon fillets

1 tablespoon curry paste (we used balti paste because it is what we had but they may work better with thai curry paste)

A handful of fresh coriander

5 pieces of white bread
Vegetable oil

Basically all you need to do is:

1. Peel and chop the potatoes, boil them and mash them up with the curry paste.  
2. Cook the salmon, flake it up and stir it gently into the potato mixture along with the chopped coriander.  
3. Toast the bread, cut the crusts off and then blend them into breadcrumbs, add a third of them into the potato mixture.  
4. Dampen your hands and form the potato mixture into balls and squash them, then coat them in the remaining breadcrumbs.  
5. Then just fry each fishcake for about 4 minutes on each side.

These fishcakes are very easy to make, the hardest bit is shaping them at the end because they can be quite soft but you can pick them up quite easily with a fish slice from a flat surface.  The ones we made were not gluten free but, since the only gluten in them is in the breadcrumbs, they could easily be made so by using gluten free bread.