Rice noodles with vegetables

Do you have too many things filling up your schedule for the day and not enough time to cook meals? Or maybe you just want to prepare a delicious Asian dish to serve to friends? Either way, we have you covered! Rice noodles and vegetables is the dish for you!

Known as “Pad Thai” this is not only an incredibly popular dish worldwide but also the national food of Thailand since 1945! You may think this is an ancient dish with a long history, but it was actually created and named in the 1930s by the Thai prime minister, Plaek Phibunsongkhram, in an attempt to create a more distinct national culinary identity for Thailand, specifically one that differentiated it from Chinese cuisine. Today you can find Pad Thai around the world in a variety of styles, ranging from very meaty to totally vegan. The original dish contains rice noodles (usually about 4 mm wide), a range of vegetables, scrambled egg, tofu, shrimp, and other forms of meat. It is prepared quickly in a hot wok, and when it is nearly cooked a sauce is added in. Usually tamarind (a legume with a taste reminiscent of lemon and apricot) sauce is used for this purpose, though, fish, garlic, shallot, chili, fresh lime, or peanut sauces may all be used instead.

Naturally, when we decided to prepare this dish, we gave it our own unique spin. We used slightly thinner rice noodles (but still oh-so-tasty) cooked up with carrots, mushrooms, and zucchini, then seasoned with soy sauce, peanuts, and black cumin. We also prepared a soup and salad to accompany our exciting main dish.

Recipe, preparation, and cost

 

Quantity

(g or ml)

Price for

4 person (EUR)

Soup

 

 

Carrots

100

0,10

Potato

60

0,06

Onion

30

0,03

Olive oil

5

0,03

Salt

5

0,00

Main dish

Rice noodles

200

1,40

Carrots

150

0,15

Zucchini

150

0,12

Mushrooms

10

0,04

Peanuts

20

0,16

Black cumin

5

0,16

Olive oil

10

0,06

Salt

5

0,00

Salad

Lettuce

250

0,68

Pumpkin seed oil

5

0,06

Chickpea

50

0,21

Flaxseed

5

0,02

Together

3,28

 

To begin with, we started with our soup. We coarsely chopped onions, carrots, and potatoes and pan-fried them up quickly with olive oil. We then added in water and quite a bit of parsley picked fresh from our window pots. When everything was nicely cooked, we pulled out our trusty stick mixer to give the soup a lovely, creamy texture.

For those of you who are newcomers to our lunches, don’t forget to be very careful when using a stick mixer with hot liquids! Keep it low in the dish and make sure you don’t have air bubbles in it before you start blending (trust us on this one, yummy soup is better enjoyed in your belly rather than splashed all over your hands and arms when hot).

To make our Pad Thai, we first cut zucchini, carrots, and mushrooms into strips. This took the longest time of our preparation, as the rest of the dish comes together quite quickly. 

If you have a wok at home, now is the time to dust it off! If you do not have one though, no big deal! Before you start cooking your vegetables, the oil must be very hot. While we heated the oil, we soaked the rice noodles in warm water. Once the vegetables were nicely cooked, we drained the noodles and added them to the vegetables and cooked it all up together a bit more. Near the end, we added soy sauce and a mixture of Asian spices to the dish to season it to our liking. When serving, we threw some roasted peanuts on top, which we had ground up a bit in our food processor. You do not want them to be powder, just broken up a bit. You can also chop them by hand if you do not have a food processor at your disposal. Even the most barely equipped kitchen can be used to cook a range of foods if you put your mind to it!

We washed our lettuce for the salad and seasoned it with pumpkin seed oil, as well as adding canned chickpeas and flax seeds.

The price of our lunch for 4 came out to 3.28€ or about 0.80€ per person! Good luck finding Pad Thai that cheap in a restaurant! Even for our standards, this was cheaper than usual; the most expensive ingredient was the rice noodles (and though it looks like you don’t get many of them, they really swell up when soaked!).


Nutritional value

With lunch consumed quantity

% From daily needs

Energy

517,69

kcal

25,90

Proteins

9,74

g

17,40

Total fats

30,10

g

68,40

Carbohydrates

54,58

g

 

Starch

2,23

g

 

Sugar

5,93

g

 

Fibers

6,12

g

24,50

Calcium (Ca)

82,91

mg

8,30

Iron (Fe)

1,98

mg

19,80

Magnesium (Mg)

67,15

mg

16,80

Phosphorus (P)

215,53

mg

30,80

Potassium (K)

620,09

mg

31,00

Sodium (Na)

1193,24

mg

217,00

Zinc (Zn)

1,42

mg

14,20

Copper (Cu)

0,24

mg

27,10

Manganese (Mn)

0,94

mg

40,90

Selenium (Se)

10,73

µg

21,50

Vitamin A

757,10

µg

75,70

Vitamin E

5,19

mg

34,60

Vitamin D

0,00

µg

0,10

Vitamin C

17,02

mg

17,00

Thiamin (B1)

0,17

mg

13,10

Riboflavin (B2)

0,18

mg

11,80

Niacin (B3)

3,79

mg

26,10

Pantothenic acid (B5)

0,62

mg

10,40

Vitamin B6

0,31

mg

20,80

Folic acid (B9)

64,91

µg

16,20

Vitamin B12

0,00

µg

0,10

Vitamin K

103,28

µg

147,50

 

Today’s lunch provided us 25% of our caloric needs for the day, but we did fall a bit short of the same number for our protein and fiber intake, which has rarely happened in our lunches thus far. The lunch was rich in vitamins and minerals, but we also fell short of the 25% of our daily requirement mark for iron, magnesium, calcium, zinc, and selenium. This is ok but does mean we need to balance this out in other meals throughout the day. In terms of vitamins, we got lots of vitamin A (75.7%) and E (34.6%), with a bit less B complex and C. Another interesting feature of today’s lunch is that we managed to consume some vitamin D and B12, which is unusual in unfortified vegan foods.

Mushrooms contain small amounts of both of these vitamins.

If you have questions about today’s lunch (or ideas for future lunches) then feel free to write to us at info@hungry-pumpkin.com and we will get back to you!

Have a great weekend!

-The Hungry Pumpkin Team

Leave a comment