Asian Market Field Trip

Thai food might be my favorite cuisine, I've been wanting to try my hand at cooking Pad See Ew for months. The only thing stopping me was two elusive ingredients: Chinese broccoli and thick black soy sauce, not regular soy sauce-- the stuff I was looking for has a consistency more like oyster sauce... or maybe molasses.

I checked the small Asian market around the corner from our apartment building, but didn't find anything. I asked the store owner just to be sure, and this is how the conversation went:

Me: "Excuse me, do you have thick black soy sauce?"
Store owner with a thick accent: "Black?"
Me: "Yes, thick black soy sauce."
Store owner: "Hmm... black... black... oh! Black! Yes! Here, black."
She pointed to a jar of black bean curd. I realized the language barrier was too high.
I thanked her politely, checked one more time, and headed home.

So anyways, my friend Melissa had told me about Ranch 99, a ginormous Asian market just a couple miles from my place, so one Tuesday night while Adam was in his night class, my friend Emily and I hopped in the car and took a field trip to Ranch 99 in search of the soy sauce. 

We found more soy sauce than one could use in a lifetime... a whole aisle of every variety you could imagine! Including, I might add, House Wife Soy Sauce.

We found our thick dark soy sauce, and we also found some interesting kinds of ice cream, like this one:

If you can read that, it says "Corn and Cheese Icecream". No thank you. 

So our search complete (I found the Chinese broccoli at a farmer's market a day or two before), we headed home to make Pad See Ew.

We went off of this recipe from Chez Pim.

Mmm... sauces. 

I love that Emily chopped all the garlic. I dislike chopping garlic, but it's always oh so worth it.

 

 

Cookin' up a storm

The picture's upside down, but this is the final product. SUCCESS!!

Here is Pim's photo:

Her recipe is here: http://www.chezpim.com/blogs/2008/01/pad-see-ew-for.html

Oh and by the way, this whole time I thought I was eating an exotic Thai dish, but Pad See Ew means "Stir-Fried with Soy Sauce". Haha! That's about as generic as it gets.