So for today's cooking adveture, I was supposed to meet up with a couple girlfriends to cook some Korean food (our favourite!) but two of the girls bailed out last minute so it was just me & Lisa cooking dinner for the night. She happened to be house sitting for a family that was away on vacation, so we had the house to ourselves! But of course there was a downfall: trying to figure out exactly where all the cooking necessities were stored!

I decided to keep it simple and cook foods with fresh ingredients, so I picked Pad Thai & Tom Yum Soup. However, I cheated and took the easy way out by buying pre-made soup base and Pad Thai sauce.. I promise to cook from scratch next time! It's kind of difficult when you're struggling to prepare yourself for the MCAT at the same time!

PC Pad Thai Sauce!

For the noodles, I went with President's Choice Pad Thai Cooking Sauce. The taste of the sauce is balanced between the tangy and and sweet flavours, and personally, I think this sauce is fantastic if you're looking for a quick fix!! Despite being on the sweet side (I prefer salty), that's easily fixed by adding a dash of salt. I first discovered this sauce when it was in the canned form, and the sauce they made was perfect, I didn't have to change a thing. It was saltier, and generally seemed to have more herbs and spices, creating a more authentic feel. Good thing Vince stocked up and has two cans in his pantry for us to cook! Otherwise, this new bottled version is very well priced at around $4, which is enough to make the noodle dish twice, on separate occasions. If you guys see the canned version, snatch those babies up right away! You won't regret it!


Wait til you see what this turns into :)

The rest of our ingredients for pad thai included: snow peas, egg, tofu balls, onions, and green onion. No meat for today, cause Lisa is a vegetarian! Not that I mind, because I don't really like meat that much.. I'm picky!


Lobo's Tom Yum Paste

As for the tom yum soup, my cheater method required the use of a packaged soup base. It's funny, because I never even meant to buy these, but they came along as a bonus for the konnyaku noodles I buy for hot pot. Anyways, if you are to buy them individually, they are also inexpensive, costing around $1.50 per packet. You can probably pick them up at your local Asian market. Hooray for deals :)


Lisa cookin' our soup!

With the soup base, it's super easy to use because it comes as a paste that sticks together, and is somewhat dry so it's easy to handle. (I don't think it's supposed to be dry, but that might've happened because they're getting pretty old.. oops!) All you do is add it to water, and add in any other ingredients you want to use. In our case, I went with green onion and mushrooms! The soup ends up somewhat dilute when you follow the package directions, so I like to double up and concentrate the soup, and adjust the flavour using freshly squeezed lime juice and my trusty Sriracha chili sauce.


Tom Yum in the making..


Noodles almost ready!

The food turned out great! We are obviously amazing cooks. The cost of the ingredients for the meal came out to $10. Perfect. :)


Yum yum in my tum tum ;)