Cooking for One: I Made a Sidewalk!

Here’s another post in my very minor series on Cooking for One. Ever since I saw this post at TGWAE, I’ve been wanting to make this easy meal for one – from what I understand, the name was from a particular Thai restaurant in New York and the dish’s real name is pad krapow, a stir fry with chilli and basil. There’s nowhere around where I live or work that serves this great one dish meal and so I’d have to fend for myself. Again, I had this on a day that I was alone for dinner. However, by cooking for two as usual, I’d have dinner and lunch the next day both taken care of – and my usual recipe doubles easily anyway.

I used my Pork with Basil and Chili recipe and instead of green beans, I used both long beans and sliced red pepper. I increased the amount of sauce as well and topped the resulting dish on white rice with a fried egg. Boy, was this filling! The egg was quite fabulous with it all, its liquid yolk spilling everywhere and adding lots of richness to each spoonful I shovelled into my mouth.

A similar recipe (but with chicken) was recently featured on Serious Eats highlighting the budget-friendliness of this preparation. Like that recipe, this time I didn’t have any Thai holy basil to hand and used Italian – do try to find the Thai holy basil if you can as it lends a totally different flavour to the dish. In London, you can buy it in New Loon Moon in Chinatown or at any of the Thai shops that are scattered throughout the city (well, in the west for sure). Feel free to make substitutes to the meat as well; I used pork as usual but chicken, turkey or beef would all work well.

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