Epicurean Bliss

Birthdays are a very interesting thing.

Don’t get me wrong; I love birthdays. Particularly my own, and those of the people who I love. Birthdays provide a great excuse to spend the day celebrating someone who is important to you, showing them just how much you care and how special they are, consequential things that can sometimes get muddied up in the hum-drum of every day life.

Birthdays can also be eye openers, though; a time to find out who is really there for you no matter what; what the essence of a relationship is; what really matters. Perhaps because it is a natural, albeit arbitrary marker in time, like January first or the summer solstice, I always find myself extremely reflective around mid-June as I watch another year of my life fold to a close, and a fresh one start anew. True to my type-A personality, I reflect on all my attempted accomplishments, any failures or shortcomings, how I can improve, and where I’m headed next. This birthday, I took it to a whole new (pseudo-melodramatic) level, and denoted the past three years of my life with labels.

Twenty-two was a year of learning. I was fresh out of college, a little fish in the seemingly infinite sea of life, working in New York City while most of my best friends were still riding out the remainder of their senior year of college. I found myself in the grind of the working world, thrown head first into a job that supposedly was the fruit of my three-and-change years at college; a market researcher for a boutique firm. Commuting three hours a day, working six days a week, pulling more late nights than I had ever during finals week, I found myself learning that the life I had been preparing for, the one that I currently had, was perhaps not the one I truly wanted.

And so twenty-three was a year of growing. I pulled myself out of that job and into one that gave me the freedom to explore my own interests and desires. I challenged myself to try one new thing that pushed me outside my comfort zone every month for a year; a challenge that took me shooting down a ski-slope in the Appalachians with a group of strangers, suffering a spectacular defeat on the ZogSports kickball field, and on a couple of blind dates that helped me get to know myself better than the people I sat across from. It brought me through the doors of ICE into a state of the art kitchen, where over five weeks I discovered that my love of cooking really was a passion, and that it wouldn’t stop here. It drove me to start this blog, which has been a great source of enjoyment and dedication for me over the past year. At the end of this year-long challenge, I enrolled in Culinary School and realized this experiment in exploring myself had truly led me to something fulfilling and amazing.

Yesterday I turned twenty-four, and I’ve decided that this year should be a year of living.

We all work hard. I look around at my friends, and see young people, barely adults, who refuse to give up, who constantly seek more from life and who refuse to settle for mediocre. There are risk-takers, adventurers, travelers and go-getters. It makes me believe that my generation, for all the criticism it receives, places an emphasis on enjoying the pleasures of life – good company, new experiences, travel, food, learning – along with the hard work that is necessary to support a fulfilling and well-rounded life. So happy am I with the place I’ve come to in my life that I’m determined to squeeze every last ounce of joy out of every facet of it in the year ahead.

I’m terrible at being surprised. Ask anyone who knows me well, and they’ll confirm that I love controlled anticipation, but surprises leave me a little unhinged. My birthday plans had originally consisted of working super late (at my little-mentioned day job), but at the last-minute a coworker offered to cover for me, and so my mom offered to come take me out to dinner to celebrate.

So you could imagine my shock when I left the office expecting to find my red-headed mother, and instead found waiting for me a dapper young man in a navy blue suit, holding bags marked with Chinese characters, full to the brim with mysterious items from Chinatown.

“Happy Birthday,” he said. “You’re mom isn’t coming. I’m cooking you dinner.”

Over a week ago, when my big birthday plans had consisted of sitting at home, working away on my laptop til ten PM, I told Adam that my birthday dinner plans were to treat myself to some Thai take-out and a big glass of wine. I think we all have that secret go-to takeout meal that we turn to when we need a pick me up, or just plain comfort. In college, it was always a calzone from a cheesy take-out place called D.P. Dough, but since I’ve moved to the city, it’s been the Pad See Ew from Little Thai Kitchen. I first fell in love with the dish when I was back at that first, horrible job, working until eleven pm, surrounded by my two-screened monitor. The sound of the elevator door opening, the instant savory smell of the greasy take-out wafting down the door, the satisfying PLUNK when I ripped open the brown bag and the staple went flying, and that first soft, succulent, sweet exotic bite was hands down, the most comforting feeling I could possible derive from a food. And it still is.

Knowing not nearly all that, but just that I enjoyed this Thai dish in general, Adam set out to make it for me in my own kitchen, using Cara’s old wok that somehow had survived from her college days. As he stood in my kitchen, whipping bottles of foreign sauces out of plastic bags, setting rigid white noodles that smelled of rotten eggs in a bowl to soak, I couldn’t help but be skeptical. How could this magical, comforting dish manifest right here in my kitchen? The beauty of Chinese takeout is that it is attainable only by surrendering and ordering it; the way it’s made is a mystery shrouded in unfamiliar cooking tools and unutterable ingredients.

Obviously, I was extremely wrong. My intimidation of this dish was based purely on a lack of knowledge, but Adam saw no such obstacle, or perhaps he just didn’t care. An hour later, we sat on the couch, staring down at the plates resting on the coffee table before us. It was just so impossible, so surprising! What sat on these plates looked exactly like what came out of the plastic containers from Little Thai Kitchen. The smell wafting up tugged on my memory, eerily familiar to the smell that had wafted through my office door two years earlier. But there was still the moment of truth.

And so we tasted it.

Dead. On. It was just like the Pad See Ew I’d had a thousand times, but better somehow, perhaps because it lacked the faint, chemical, over-salted taste of our favorite Asian cooking ingredient, MSG. Maybe it was the fact that it hadn’t been sitting there, steeping in its own juices under a heat lamp for hours, until a phone call acted as a catalyst for it to be shoveled into an aluminum tin and sent on a delivery man’s bike to be shuttled ten blocks away. More likely, it was because of the amazingly fresh and unexplainably authentic ingredients that had been procured from the Deluxe Food Market, a recent Chinatown discovery.

Any way you slice it, this was perfection. We washed down each taste with a sip of Riesling, the sweetness neutralizing the salty soy flavor and cleansing the palate for each new bite. The noodles had alchemistically morphed from dry, crumbly white sticks to supple, slightly sticky brown layers of heaven, sponges for the dish’s sauce. And the sauce! A smooth, sweet-and-salty combination of all the traditional flavors of Chinese cuisine; dark soy, light soy, oyster and fish sauces. This combination was the key; the golden ticket that got us right into take-out-at-home heaven.

So I guess even in a year of living, you can’t help but learn. Like last night – I learned that I secretly actually do love surprises, even if I make it nearly impossible for others to deliver them; I learned that a mysterious, seemingly impossibly to make dish can be quite easily made in the comfort of your own home if you only, like so many things in life, find within yourself the courage to try. 

Pad See-Ew Noodles with Pork – Serves 4

Adapted from AllRecipes.com

Ingredients

• 1 (12 ounce) package wide rice noodles
• 2 cups of Napa cabbage cut in 1/2 inch strips
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons crushed garlic
• 1 pound of pork chops, cut into quarter-inch strips
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 6 tablespoons oyster sauce
• 6 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoon fish sauce
• 2 tablespoon white sugar
• 1 pinch salt and ground black pepper to taste
• 2 eggs

Place the dry rice noodles in a bowl, cover with hot water, and let soak until white and soft but not mushy, about 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Mix together the oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce and sugar to make your Pad See-Ew sauce for the dish. Reserve.

Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat; cook the garlic in the hot oil until fragrant, about a minute. Stir in the sliced pork and quickly stir fry for about a minute, then cover the skillet and cook until the meat is just turning from pink to grey, about 5 . Whisk the water and cornstarch together in a bowl; pour into the skillet and toss with the meat to coat. Add about half of the Pad See-Ew sauce (you can add more later, to taste). Add the rice noodles and the cabbage and stir to mix evenly. Season with salt and pepper. Reduce heat to low and allow the mixture to simmer while you prepare the eggs.

Prepare a small skillet with cooking spray and heat over medium-low heat. Cook the egg by scrambling it in the prepared skillet until just cooked through. Add the cooked egg to the other skillet and stir to incorporate. Add more of the Pad See-Ew sauce, if desired (not recommended). Serve hot.

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