Pad Thai with Peanut Sauce

Hi Zucchini Runner faithful! It’s me, Mr. Zucchini Runner. I’ve been asked to do a guest post on this dish to help out Mrs. Zucchini Runner. She has close to 1.4 million other things she’s working on right now but she always wants to make sure she feeds your appetites for new recipes so here I am!

We were at the store awhile back and Mrs. Zucchini Runner saw a box of Pad Thai noodles on the shelf and decided to throw them in the cart. We didn’t have a specific recipe in mind, she just wanted to have them just in case.

Well just in case happened a few weeks later. We put this dish together on a whim, I can’t remember exactly how we decided we needed to have Pad Thai but once the decision was made we had to figure out what we wanted to put on the noodles. After a quick discussion we decided to go with a peanut sauce and made ours by combining recipes from 3 different books and using what we had in our kitchen. It turned out incredible and didn’t take that long to prepare!

We always try and have lots of colors on our plate. Even though we added carrots and mushrooms to the Pad Thai we decided to add a nutritional power house side dish of Swiss chard and onions. Always remember people, the more colorful your food is the better it is for you. And that’s natural color, not red dye #40!!

 

 

A few tips on the order to makes things easier; start sautéing the carrots, mushrooms etc. first since this step takes the longest. Once that is going do the sauce, and cook the noodles last since they only take a few minutes and are best served right out of the water.

Sauté olive oil, garlic, carrots and mushrooms in a large skillet until the carrots are cooked to your desired tenderness.

For the sauce, combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and microwave for 30 seconds. (This is to soften the peanut butter.) Then using an immersion blender, blend everything until no solids are left. Set aside.

While the carrots and mushrooms are sautéing and the sauce is set aside you can start the brown rice noodles, which cook quickly.

While the noodles are cooking combine the peanut sauce with the sautéed vegetables in the pan you cooked them in. The peanut sauce should still be warm so all you need to do is heat it up and let the flavors mesh.

When the noodles are done add them to the pan with the peanut sauce and vegetables give it a nice mix around and slap it on your plates. Make it pretty by adding the crushed peanuts and green onions on top (don’t tell Mrs. Zucchini Runner but I pulled the onions off of mine after she took the picture, they look pretty but I’m not a fan of raw onions), put whatever super healthy colorful side dish you decided to whip up on the side, wipe off any salivation coming out of your mouth and enjoy!

 

Social tagging: brown rice noodles > dinner > gluten-free > noodles > pad thai > peanut > peanut sauce > vegan > vegetarian