57 flavor Phad Thai

*Disclaimer:  This post is not a request for phad thai recipes or where I can get better ones. I actually have a pretty good phad thai recipe that I didn't use because I hadn't gotten all the ingredients. This was my Iron Chef moment.

Somehow, like most weekends, the time had gotten away from me and all of a sudden, it was 6 p.m. I needed to get dinner ready or the kids would be late for bed making them grumpy and whiny in the morning.  That also means that my alone time, that precious kidless time from their bedtime to our bedtime evaporates. That leads to patience-reserve-on-empty parenting. You see how everything snowballs? All because I didn't start prepping dinner at 4:30 p.m.

I looked in my fridge at that late hour and saw that I had all the ingredients for a quickie phad thai, the first recipe I had ever tried -- one that was most certainly posted by somebody who doesn't have easiest access to tamarind  or dried shrimp or even tofu. It called for ingredients like vinegar, tomato paste, sugar and fish sauce. I did remember that it was quick and easy. Considering my time crunch, I thought it would be a good dinner.

I soaked the noodles, heated the oil for the meat and garlic, and then went rummaging for the tomato paste and vinegar. It was then that I realized that the pantry staple of tomato paste was missing from my arsenal. Totally unfair! I already had the noodles soaking.

It was then that inspiration struck me. Ketchup. Catsup. However you spell it, organic ketchup has listed as its top three ingredients:  tomato paste, vinegar & sugar. Hazzah! Dinner was saved with a little bit of ingenuity. I ended up thinning out the catsup with a little bit of water. Surprisingly, it turned out a passable, edible, even delightful phad thai.

My apologies to any thai people out there.