Haystacks Pad Thai

First off, this recipe is "Pad Thai" only in the very loosest possible sense of the word.  Secondly, this recipe has been a LONG time in the making.  I started writing it back at the very beginning of the summer, maybe even late spring.

Up until a couple of years ago when my stepdaughter gave up gluten, I used to happily make the tofu pad thai recipe out of the Still Life with Menu by Mollie Katzen.  Of course, I doubled the amount of sauce and left out any ingredients I didn't like because...that's just how I cook.  Plus, it was super sweet and saucy, so the kids loved it.

With gluten being out of the picture, I needed something to soak up all that yummy sauce.  Rice seemed like the next best thing, and since there's not really a point to eating totally empty carbohydrates unless they happen to be covered in chocolate...brown rice won the prize.

But I was unhappy with my final outcome picture, where I showed my newly invented recipe in all it's delicious glory.

The problem was, it wasn't so very glorious.  But then the fantabulous food photographer Valerie Lamaree wrote a guest post for me and I figured out what I needed to know from my very own blog! 

And so now I have a picture of the final product that doesn't look like barf:

I've said it before & it's worth saying again - isn't Valerie THE BEST?!?!?!  

Here are all my ingredients, all gathered up and ready to go:

First up, three scrambled eggs.  You're supposed to cook them long enough to get them all dried out.  I don't know why.

I'm lazy about doing dishes, so I move the egg out of the pan and use that same one to cook the tofu which (you'll notice) I've already cut into cubes.  

Here's something even lazier: I like to slice the tofu while it's still in the box or little plastic tub.  Why dirty the cutting board and get tofu juice everywhere?

Normally I buy the extra firm, but Costco had a great deal on firm.  It's not as firm as the extra firm, but it did come in a box of six kajillion for the price of a tube of toothpaste.  And it's organic, so you can't beat that.  I added a little garlic after the tofu was mostly browned.

Did I forget to mention that brown rice takes forever and ever to cook?  It's not the kind of thing you can start five minutes before you want to eat, so...I started that first.  

The sauce is pretty easy: a quarter cup of brown sugar, a quarter cup of gluten free soy sauce, four tablespoons of peanut butter,  and a quarter of a cup of apple cider vinegar.

Mix the sauce in with the rice when it's done, and then put the eggs and tofu on top.  Of course, you can add in scallions or mung beans.  

We usually add red crushed pepper after it's already on the plate (so that The Boonga doesn't have to burn her tiny little mouth off).

And that's it - yum!