Pad Krapow Gai (Basil Chicken)

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Preamble

This evening, I cooked Tom Yum Talay (hot & sour seafood soup) and Pad Krapow Gai (basil chicken) for four people. Lucky for you goons, I brought a camera along, and I have painstakingly documented the process for you. So, like any good meal, we shall begin with the soup!

Tom Yum Talay For the Tom Yum Talay, you'll need:

Ingredients

    * Tom Yum paste
    * Button mushrooms (quite big, preferably about an inch in diameter)
    * Coriander (or "cilantro" as you wacky Americans call it)
    * Prawns (I used 5 motherfucker huge uncooked king prawns)
    * Mussels (200g in the shells, wash them and rinse them and take off their weird beard things)
    * Lemon juice
    * Fish sauce

Here are the mussels: File:Mussels.jpg

The prawns:

The mushrooms before and after slicing them into quarters:

Preparation

Take a litre of water, put it in a saucepan, and bring it to the boil. Then, add 4 or 5 teaspoons of soup paste, and stir it in. The water should turn red, and a little oily, like you see in this picture:

Okay, that's not a very good photo, but you'll get a more accurate idea of what it should like from upcoming photos. Anyway, if the soup tastes spicy enough for your liking, that's good. If it's not spicy enough, add the paste a teaspoon at a time until you're happy. Once you've done that, add a little bit of lemon juice and a little bit of fish sauce. It's said that fish sauce is "the salt of Southeast Asia", so treat fish sauce with caution. You want to make sure that you add enough to bring out the flavour, but you don't want to ruin your food. Anyway, here are pictures of me adding the lemon juice and fish sauce.

Once you've done that, add a bunch of coriander...

...and the mushrooms...

Leave it for a little, then add the prawns and mussels. Let it cook for a couple minutes on a low heat. The mussels and prawns should be done by now. Here is a picture of a big, delicious prawn.

Anyway, check the soup to see if you like it. Add lemon juice and fish sauce to taste, and you're DONE!

So, now for...

Pad Krapow Gai For the Pad Krapow Gai, you're going to need:

Ingredients

   * Chicken breasts (I used four on this occasion, one per person)
   * Basil (the more the merrier)
   * Ginger (doesn't really matter how much)
   * Garlic (three cloves, even if you are making this dish for one person use three cloves of garlic)
   * Green chillies (I used three because my family can't take much spice. If it were just me, I would have used at least five or six, because I love hot food)
   * Onions (I used two)
   * A cup of chicken stock
   * Soy sauce
   * Oyster sauce
   * Fish sauce

That's a lot of ingredients! Here are pictures of the stuff you'll need.

I only used a quarter of that ginger by the way.

Preparation

Anyway, cut up your garlic, chillis, and ginger, like this:

Now, put the garlic and ginger in a bowl on the side, because you're not going to use them for a while. Cut your onions as such:

Set the onions and chillies on the side, and cut the chicken up into small chunks. In Thailand, they use minced (that's "ground" for you Americans) chicken for this particular dish, but since I don't have the requisite equipment, I am quite happy to cut it into little bits. Anyway, I fucked up a little, and didn't cut the chicken up quite as small as I'd have liked. But it was still good, eventually - this is what it looked like.

Anyway, put some oil in a wok, heat it up, and when it's good and hot (I use a tiny bit of onion to test) add the onions and chillis.

Add more oil if you need to. When the onions are a little brown around the edges, add the chicken.

After frying the chicken for a little while, until it's a little more white and a little less pink, add your cup of chicken stock.

Let the chicken simmer in the stock for a while. Eventually, it won't be pink anymore, and this is when you add a shake of soy sauce (about 1.5 tbsp I think)...

...a BIG shake of oyster sauce (I would say about 3 tbsp)...

...and about 1tbsp of fish sauce:

I've got to admit, I don't follow measurements when adding those three things. I've been cooking this dish long enough that the process is pretty much 100% instinctive. Besides - if you want to adjust the flavour of the food, you can test the food and add more ingredients as required.

So anyway, now that you've added all that stuff, it's time to add all that basil. Add loads - it reduces in size significantly.

Let that cook for a little while, and let the basil reduce in size. Once it's shrunk down a bit, add the garlic and ginger.

Stir that in, let it cook, add extra soy/fish/oyster sauces to taste, and in a minute, it'll be ready!

So, here is the finished Tom Yum Talay:

and here is the finished Pad Krapow Gai:

Enjoy your meal!