Further cooking experimentation

Tonight I tried another dish I never made before, Chicken Pad Thai. The description in my Instagram post:

Made Chicken Pad Thai (a Thai noodle stir fry) for the first time tonight. I made the sauce from scratch using an Australian’s recipe. The chicken was perfectly cooked, and the sauce was pretty good, BUT: There wasn’t enough sauce because I had too much noodles. I also didn’t get the noodles quite right, partly because I used too much, and because I’d never used them before. 👍

I give myself a solid B+ for my first attempt. It was good enough to try again—with less noodles.

When I said I used too much of the noodles, I wasn’t kidding: I have enough for lunch tomorrow, and possibly dinner, too. What that actually means is that I stumbled across how much to make if I was to make it for the family. Serendipity, that was. No, wait—good planning is what is was. Yeah, that’s what I meant.

In any case, it was a little fiddly to make, but that was mainly because I’d never made it before. I’m sure that if I make it a couple more times, it’ll be much easier for me, and certainly far easier than butter chicken is.

Speaking of butter chicken, I made it again a week or so ago and it was truly awful—the worst attempt yet. I made the alterations to the recipe that I’d planned to do, and it was a disaster—not at all what I wanted. Thing is, I decided against using a different recipe because it was so complicated, but maybe it would’ve been better. Or, maybe that’s never going to be a dish I get right. Nigel often said that he never found a butter chicken that was anywhere as good as what a good Indian restaurant or takeaways would sell. Maybe I should stick to buying it from one of them: It’d certainly be much, much easier.

I often think that Nigel would be pleased (and surprised…) to see me experimenting so much with cooking. That was always his thing, and I tended to just make the same things over and over. Well, actually, he did, too, but when he experimented, it was always good. I also think he might be a bit perturbed that I didn’t do all this for him. Oh well, at least it gives me something to do, I guess. I think it’s about time I made a list of the dishes I want to try making. If I do, that’ll give me something to talk about, too.