adventures in Thai cooking

Me: "What do you want for dinner tonight?"

Matt: "How about Pad Thai?"
Me: "...ok"

I decided that I wanted to make "authentic" pad thai, or at least as authentic as I could make it. I got a recipe online which seemed easy enough: Eggs, peanut oil, garlic, fish sauce, tamarind paste, rice noodles, sugar, salt, tofu, bean sprouts, chives, peanuts, and lime. Totally doable. However, on a Sunday evening, finding all of the ingredients is rather challenging. The ingredients to make pad thai seemed fine, but throughout the process of making it I became extremely confused. It didn't seem like I was making the correct dish- tons of runny egg and dark red colored sugary liquid.

Matt: "It smells... interesting... in here..."
Me: "yeah, I don't know if we're going to be able to eat it"

The sauce calls for this fruit called Tamarind. The recipe I used called for 2 Tbs of tamarind paste- a very small amount. Apparently, this is not an item stocked at one's local grocery store. I did however luck out and found a store that carried fresh tamarind which, according to the internet, is fairly hard to procure. This is what tamarind looks like:

Very very odd. Inside it looks like a bunch of dates connected by roots that shoot out from one end and grow down the sides. They are soooooo good though. Of course I only needed 1 for my recipe so now I have an entire box full to try in other recipes and snack on.

After everything was all mixed together it finally started to look and smell like it was supposed to. And, voila!

Pad thai. It was really yummy and even better the next day for leftovers.