Homecooking with the two Js: Thai Night

One of our favorite cuisine is Thai food, and one of our favorite Thai dish ever is Pad Kee Mao, also known as the Drunken Noodles. It is basically flat rice noodles with meat, vegetables, thick soy sauce, garlic, basic and chili peppers.  According to wikipedia, it is a "Chinese-influenced dish that was made popular by the Chinese people living in Laos and Thailand." Why is it called drunken noodles? We've heard and read on the internet that it is a popular dish for drunks... go figure... 

We decided to try and cook Pad Kee Mao together tonight. Why? because first of all, cooking together is more fun than cooking alone. I think it is time better spent together than going out to eat in a restaurant. Second, we are living on a budget now and we can't  afford to eat out all the time. Last but not least, there is something that is just more satisfying when you eat something you make yourself (that is, of course, assuming you didn't completely ruin the dish).

So after managing to find a decent recipe from allrecipes.com and all the ingredients we needed, off we went into our kitchen (mind you, this recipe we found is probably not the most authentic recipe, but it was close enough.. and it got 4/5 stars, so we thought we'd give it a try).
We bought fresh flat rice noodles, so the time it took to soak it in water was considerably shorter than the dried noodles.

These are the necessary ingredients for our dish:

We used chicken, carrots, serrano peppers and basil. But the dish is pretty versatile; you can add chicken, beef or pork, bell peppers, sprouts..or perhaps tofu for those of you who are vegetarians.

Making the dish was actually quite easy. After soaking the noodles in hot water until softened, we cooked the noodles in the thick soy sauce and garlic and sugar. Then we removed the noodles, cooked the meat and vegetables with more garlic, thick soy sauce, salt, pepper and sugar. We added some regular soy sauce as well. 

The whole cooking process didn't take us long, probably about 30-35 minutes total.  This is counting the time we spent rinsing and re-cooking the noodles since the first time we put in two tablespoons of sugar instead of two teaspoons. Hey we are amateur chefs here, we were bound to screw up somewhere along the way. 

As of the final product? Well, it didn't look quite as good as the ones you order in Thai restaurants:

       

We probably stirred the noodles too much, they were sort of semi-broken apart by the time we were done cooking. But the taste: it was pretty damn delicious. Not as good as the ones we've had at real Thai restaurants, but good enough for a couple of wannabe chefs who never cooked flat noodles before. 

We both practically had two servings each for dinner! 

~josie                                                                                                                                               

Living the dream..or merely daydreaming?

When you go to our blog, you will see the title that says, "challenges and misadventures on the road to living the ultimate dream."  I have been thinking about the phrase "living the dream", in our case being living in the US Virgin Islands. I realized now I don't really like that phrase...it sounds..well, dreamy-ish... unrealistic...foolish....

Sure, who doesn't think living in the caribbean  to be living the ultimate dream? (Well, maybe a few of you, but majority will probably agree with me on that one).  The problem is, dreams are unreal. So when I tell people that we are going to live our dream...of course many are skeptical because it is unrealistic. Heck, I was skeptical...and I think sometimes I am still a little bit skeptical even though I have decided to do this with my husband.

I tried to convince myself that we are not those people who just quit their job and buy a one-way ticket to do something utterly crazy and unpredictable like this. Well, okay.. I know we are NOT one of those people (I don't think I can handle the stress and anxiety level of being that spontaneous..). Or at least, we are less crazy and less unpredictable (well, actually I am really not crazy and very predictable, my husband is somewhat the opposite of me). But, who can predict, no matter how much planning we do, of how we will manage once we move there? That's the part that scares me.. a little bit... and makes me skeptical of this whole idea.

So I kept going through this over and over again in my head, reassuring myself that this will work.
We do have a plan, and a timeline. We are working hard to save as much  money as we can, looking into networking online, searching blogs online about people who made it there, gathering paperwork for getting my PA license there, gathering paperwork about getting a business started there, etc, etc, etc (I plan on blogging in more detail about our planning and prepping of moving there as we go). It should work, right? It is possible to live there, heck tons of people did it. But tons more did it and went back to the mainland... for various reasons, including being unrealistic with their goals in life.

Some people probably think we are crazy, foolish, daydreamers. We are not. There is a reason why we want to live there, and it doesn't just involve cheap rum, gorgeous caribbean beaches and Johnny Depp...okay it really doesn't involve Johnny Depp at all. It really is about something more than that. I read online from people who already moved there that their first advice is to think why we want to move. If the answer is to escape from our life in the mainland, that is not a good enough reason. Well, I don't think that is our reason. It's just we are both sick of living in a place where everything that matters don't really matter. People only care about themselves, ignorance is rampant, all that matters here is money, what Kim Kardashian is doing and how to get everything I want right now. My husband said it perfectly: "there is no sense of community here." This is the major reason why we want to move, and why not move where it is also beautiful?

And where is that distinction between living the dream and reaching your ultimate goal in life? I like to call this reaching our goal in life: to live fulfilled, to live the best life we can be, to give something back and be a part of humanity. Is that too dreamy-ish? too unrealistic? Majority of my family will probably say yes. They will say just get a good job, buy a house and have children. But our goal in life is not to just work and have kids (something that a lot of my family members do not understand). Our goal is not just to do what everybody else is doing. We want a purpose and a sense of accomplishment in our life that we did something truly important and worth it for us. After all, shouldn't that be what living is all about?

I'd like to think that we are being realistic... and not merely foolish.

~josie

          He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
                                      ~Friedrich Nietzsche

          The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, 

                 and  should have.
                                      ~Louis E. Boone