Definitely Not Pad Thai

I was really excited several weeks ago when a friend of mine posted on Facebook that she had made pad thai and it was really good.  Since I've recently acquired a taste for pad thai, I decided I had to try it.

The recipe my friend used was for vegetarian pad thai, and I have a lot of chicken, so I searched for chicken pad thai and combined the recipes a bit - mainly, used the vegetarian recipe but copied the chicken pad thai recipe's method of handling the chicken.

Most of the cooking for this was actually done by my friends, because I was rather sick and out of it when it came time to make the food, and didn't really want to spread germs.  My job mostly consisted of handling the raw chicken... we figured that cooking raw chicken enough to kill Salmonella would probably also be plenty to kill my cold germs.  (In other news, I detest raw chicken.  Its one of the scariest things you can have in your kitchen, and its not exactly pleasant to touch either.)

One of the warnings I've seen about trying to make pad thai is that it is very difficult to not overcook the noodles.  For this reason, I was relieved when the instructions said not to cook the noodles, but just to soak them in water.  So we started by soaking the noodles in water.

Meanwhile, I started prepping the meat.  It had to marinade, mostly in soy sauce (I think it was soy sauce and corn starch).

The recipe called for shallots but we didn't have any, so instead we used onion and added some extra garlic (after extensive googling to check if this was a viable replacement for shallots, of course).  Some of the shallots, or, in this case, all of the onion, was fried to eventually be a topping.

The only particularly strange ingredient in the pad thai was tamarind.  It's a very sour fruit which I've managed to develop quite a taste for.  In this case, we boiled the tamarind so we had a thick paste, and then strained it, and then accidentally put the remnants (including several large seeds) in the garbage disposal.  The measuring spoons also ended up down there.  Whoops.

Someone made sauce.  I don't really know what was in it, except that there was a lot of soy sauce.  Enough soy sauce that we started to get a little suspicious - pad thai isn't usually salty.

The sauce also included sriracha.  We didn't have any sriracha, but that's the benefit of living in a dorm - I ran around knocking on doors until I found some.

Then eggs were cracked.  The recipe called for a lot of eggs.

I'm admittedly not quite sure what this was supposed to be a picture of.

Chicken after frying.  The marinade had an... interesting texture to it.

We fried up the eggs basically like an omelet.  Like I said, a lot of eggs.

When we'd finally finished all that, we mixed the eggs, chicken, noodles, "shallots", and some other things I didn't get around to mentioning (bean sprouts, etc) together in the wok.  All done!

Looks delicious and exactly like pad thai, right?

Wrong.

While everyone ate it and said it tasted good enough, this meal was very far from pad thai, and not exactly appetizing.  If anything, it was a bad yakisoba.

The only mistakes we really made were (maybe) marinading the chicken and (definitely) letting the noodles soak for too long.  Remember how I said its easy to overcook the noodles?  It's really easy to oversoak them in cold water too, apparently.  So we had somewhat slimy, overly soft noodles in our too-salty sauce.

Sometime soon, I need to get real pad thai again so I can remember what it tastes like.  Mixbowl, anyone?

Maybe I should have stuck to nachos?