I really like posting about ethnic foods, don’t I? This shouldn’t be an odd thing, honestly. We live in a nation that is the home of so many different cultures that there is no excuse for not experimenting with ethnic food. I actually know people who are completely unwilling to try the foods of different cultures (aside from a taco) and I really can’t understand that kind of closed-mindedness; and that’s all it is. Closed mindedness.
Pad Thai is an ethnic food that should be easy for a closed minded person to try. It has familiar ingredients (particularly in the recipe I’ll be sharing with you tonight) and it’s also delicious. It’s a peanut sauce with many different notes of taste. It can also be hot as hell, but in the best way possible.
The story behind this recipe is SparkPeople. It is a *FREE* online community that supports weight loss and healthy lifestyles. I have been a member of this community for about three years now. I love it and have written about it on my personal blog a few times. The site offers a recipe page where members share healthy low-calorie and low-fat recipes. As usual, I tend to stay away from user-generated recipe pages and I have had some bad luck with SparkRecipes, but I did find some gold within. This recipe is called Pong Pong Pork Chops, but this peanut sauce is so good, that I use it on chicken breasts or I double the recipe and make Pad Thai Noodles. This recipe is super easy to make and you don’t need many specialty ingredients (most I keep in my house all the time). Here’s the recipe exactly as it was from the website, with the original author credited:
Pong Pong Pork Chops
Spark People Recipes (ONCEMORE2006)
4 pork loin chops
1 medium onion, sliced thin
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tblsp. soy sauce
2 tsp. hot mustard
2 tsp. Splenda
2 tsp. sesame oil
2 Tblsp. Tabasco Sauce
4 Tblsp. peanut butter
½ cup water
1 tsp. powdered ginger
In a non-stick skillet sauté onion and garlic with a small amount of water until onion is translucent and set aside.
Trim all fat from chops and make small cuts through any membrane on the outside to prevent chops from curling.
Brown pork chops on both sides and then return onions and garlic to pan. Mix the rest of the ingredients to make a sauce, then with more water if needed.
Add to pan the chops, onions and garlic and heat through.
Serve with rice.
Chicken breasts can be used instead of pork.
YIELD: 4 servings.
This recipe is fantastic as is. Tonight, however I made Pad Thai Noodles. Basically, all I did was double all of the ingredients except for the pork chops (there were no pork chops tonight. I simply sauteed two chicken breasts to serve on top of the noodles), the onion, and the garlic. To make Pad Thai Noodles this way, start boiling your noodles first. Then saute your onion and garlic in the water just as the recipe instructs. When the onions are translucent, add all of your sauce ingredients to the pan and stir until mixed.
When you make pasta and a thick sauce to go with it, you should position the pots together closely on your cook top. This is so that when the pasta is finished you can scoop it into the sauce. It is not good cooking practice to pour your pasta into a colander and then dumping dry pasta into a thick sauce like this. A thick sauce like this always benefits from a bit of pasta water because the water is hot and starchy. Use a pasta scoop (it looks like a ladle with teeth) to put the pasta in your saucepan.
If your sauce is still thick after the pasta has been added, you have that big pot of pasta water and you can add a little bit at a time to the sauce until it reaches the perfect consistency. It needs to be thick, but not gummy.
I used fettucini as the noodles in this dish. Regular spaghetti noodles work also. I point this out so that you realize that you don’t need to buy specialty pasta for this dish. Tonight I had a box of fettucini in my pantry and used it. That’s how a lot of my cooking goes. Whatever is in my pantry that might work gets thrown into the pot. And let me tell you, this dish was GOOOOOOOD! It was spicy, so if you’re a wimp about spice, just cut back on the Tabasco. Enjoy!
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