Pad Thai Weekend

When I was in the States last month, I was very happy to, over the course of three weeks, eat Thai food three times. I returned to Granada particularly dejected at the lack of culinary diversity in this fair burg.

Naturally, I decided to see if, given the lack of Thai restaurants between here and Tarifa (that's the closest one I could find on the Internets), I couldn't make a close-enough approximation of Pad Thai at home to keep the withdrawal jitters from kicking in.

I noodled around on the Interweb until I came upon this. Naturally, I hopped on my bike and got to the Asian supermarket just before it closed. They didn't have tamarind of any sort, and they only had industrial-sized bags of sprouts (which I knew I wouldn't get through), so I went home with rice noodles and the idea that I'd somehow still manage to make a Pad Thai.

I'd bought a kilo of yellow plums a couple of days beforehand, and some of them were starting to get mushy, so I made a batch of tart plum jam (the skins were delicious with sugar) and figured that some of that would be a suitable, if inauthentic, substitute for tamarind paste. Anyhow, I made some, and it was pretty good, with a nice combination of tangy and sweet, but it still wasn't what I was looking for.

This was about a week and a half ago.

I mentioned my tamarind quest to Marisa, at Páprika, figuring that she would have some ideas. She was the one who knew about the Asian supermarket, after all (she told me about it when I noticed that they were serving Thai black rice.) Anyhow, she had a jar of tamarind paste that she said she never used, and she gave it to me.

I made myself Pad Thai for dinner on Friday, for lunch on Saturday:


and then again for lunch yesterday:


Delicious! Now I have to ration the tamarind paste, until I manage to get myself a dealer.