I’ve had this voice in the back of my head saying, “If you lived in Thailand, you wouldn’t notice that you’re gluten-free.” Apparently, that’s true: unlike a lot of Pan-Asian food, Thai food uses rice almost exclusively.
Thing is, I have no idea how to cook Thai food, and a lot of the spices involved are expensive, hard to find, and I’m not sure I can spell them. This is where pre-made sauces come in: where you are cooking outside your usual spice library and you don’t have a lot of time, a cooking sauce that includes everything is a lot less expensive. (This particular sauce had coconut milk, pineapple juice and galangal, which is a Southeast Asian ginger. Without the pre-made part, this dish would have a cost that is stratospheric.)
Ingredients:
2 tilapia filets, on special ($2.59)
one red pepper (on sale .50)
one cabbage from the back of the refrigerator
1 cup rice noodles (Mine had a 2009 expiration date. No worries–they don’t go bad.)
Thai pineapple stir fry sauce
2 tablespoons cooking oil
2 teaspoons wheat free tamari
Kitchen apparati:
medium-sized sauce pan
wooden spatula
large nonstick frying pan
plates
cutting knives
Directions:
Cut 1 cup of the cabbage into small shreds. Put three or four cups of water in the saucepan, and turn the heat to “high”. Put the cabbage shreds in the water. When the water boils, add the rice noodles and turn the heat down to medium-high. Boil the noodles and cabbage for another five minutes. Take frozen tilapia out of the freezer, remove the packaging, and put the fish on a plate. Set your microwave to defrost the fish. Drain the cabbage and noodles and set aside. Once the fish is defrosted, slice it into 1 by 2 in slices. Put some oil and wheat free tamari in the nonstick frying pan and turn the heat to medium high. Fry the fish for about four minutes a side. Take the red pepper and slice half of it into matchstick sized pieces, into the noodle-cabbage mixture. Once the fish is fried, add the noodles, cabbage, red pepper, and half of the Thai cooking sauce into the non-stick frying pan, and cook the whole mess for another ten minutes, enough to soften the pepper slightly.
Serves four.
Cost: About $2.00 a serving
Looks yummy! What brand/type of sauce is it and where did you get it?
Sprouts, which is a U.S. health food chain originating in the Western U.S., for those of you not in North America. It’s called World Foods, and you can also buy it on amazon.com.
i love it