"Pad Thai"

This is my version of pad thai, hence the quotations. It is more of a combo of a stir-fry and pad thai. This is an extremely quick recipe, that can be whipped up in under 30 minutes, especially if you have leftover meat. In this recipe, I used shrimp, but in the past I have substituted left-over chicken breast (even with jerk sauce on it) and left-over ground turkey. 

Ingredients:

Sauce:
1½ tbsp Thai Sweet Chili sauce
1/3 cup of Thai Fish sauce
3 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tbsp reduced-sodium soy sauce
2 tsp red pepper flakes
~2 tbsp ketchup

~20 prawns
3 cloves of garlic
3 eggs, lightly beaten
5 medium carrots, sliced in the food processor  
3 tbsp natural peanut butter
1/2 cup of chopped cilantro
1/2 package of 454g rice noodles, cooked
2 limes to garnish

Method:
1. Whisk together all ingredients for the sauce in a small bowl and set aside for later
2. In a wok or large skillet, heat cooking oil and fry the garlic and shrimp, until the shrimp has turned pink. Remove from the pan and set aside. 
3.  Add more oil to pan if needed and scramble the eggs. 
4. Once the eggs are almost completely scrambled, add the peanut butter and let it fry in the pan for a few minutes, then add the carrots and the sauce (I like to use peanut butter instead of adding chopped peanuts at the end because I find that if you have leftovers, peanuts do not taste as good the next day if mixed into the entire mixture)
5. Add the cooked rice noodles. Mix together well. Then add the cilantro and the cooked prawns (if using left-over meat, I add it with the carrots to heat it up from the fridge) 

-A

Healthy Quinoa Jambalaya

This week Mel and I found out that we are going to be living 4 months together in Calgary for our last year of pharmacy rotations. This will give us tons of time to cook things together and be creative. I think we come up with some of the better recipes when we are together; I am more of the structured person in the kitchen, thinking logically before adding an ingredient and how much of each ingredient should be added, which sometimes can cause me to be less creative and miss out on adding different unique ingredients. Mel on the other hand has no patience in the kitchen and doesn't like to think about things before she does it so she just throws random ingredients in. This makes her recipes really unique with creative and cool ingredients but can sometimes make her recipes go awry.

This quinoa jambalaya is one of my favourite recipes we have made together and represents the balance between our two cooking styles when we work together.

Ingredients:
746 ml Can of Tomatoes
1 cup Quinoa
4 Chicken Chorizo organic sausage (we found this at the Strathcona Farmer's Market I'm not sure where else you can find it, so you can just replace it with normal chorizo if need be, it just won't be quite as healthy)
~1 1/2 cups Reduced sodium chicken broth
2 Large carrots
1 Onion
1 Red pepper
1 Jalapeno
2 stalks celery
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp each of: chili powder, cumin, red hot chili flakes, hot paprika
1 tbsp olive oil

Step 1: Empty the juices from the tomato can into a 2 cup measuring cup. Top off the remaining amount with the chicken broth until it makes up 2 cups. Bring to a boil in a saucepan and then add the quinoa. Turn to low and cook for 15 minutes.

Step 2: Chop the chorizo into about half inch thick pieces. Ours was frozen so we had to cook it a bit before we could do this. Chop the onion and cook with the chorizo until no longer pink.

Step 3: Have your sous chef chop up all the vegetables. We grated the carrots but chopped the rest of the vegetables and minced the jalapeno and garlic

This is my sous chef hard at work ;)

Step 4: Mix all the spices into a bowl with the oil and mix well adding it to the chorizo in the pan. Add all the vegetables to the onion and chorizo and cook for about 5 minutes- we both prefer our vegetables still a bit crunchy but if you like yours completely soft you can cook it for longer

Step 5: Add the can of tomatoes and the quinoa to the vegetable mix and simmer for about 10 minutes. Mel hates chunky tomatoes but I love them so we had to compromise and blended it up slightly with the immersion blender before adding.

We topped ours with green onions to serve

-A

Spicy Ginger Stir-fry

The best thing about a stir-fry is that it is different every time. I basically use it as a fridge clean out picking whatever vegetables I have left in my fridge and tossing it into the recipe. This week I had a lot of vegetables left over from a function and inspired from a trip to The Japanese village I had for a birthday this week, I decided to make a stir fry. The worst thing about getting stir fry at a restaurant is that they are extremely salty, I have to admit I am a salt lover, preferring chips over chocolate any day, but I don't eat out often so when I do I'm surprised at how disgustingly salty the meals are. When you make your own stir fry you can control the salt and it just makes the other flavours come out so much more.

This week I used:
Red Cabbage
Kale
Broccoli
Carrots
Peppers
Cauliflower
leftover chicken breast
Garlic
Ginger

I heated the pan and cooked it in 1 tbsp of sesame oil, cooking the vegetables that take the longest (ie carrots and caulifower) first and adding the quick cooking vegetables, like the kale last.

For the sauce, I made one that goes with pretty much any meat and poured this on top once I was about half way done cooking all the ingredients:
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tsp powdered ginger
1/4 cup of reduced sodium chicken broth
3 tbsp reduced sodium soy sauce
1 tsp corn starch
Hot red chili flakes

Pair it with some brown basmati rice

-A