Ok. I must confess that I don’t cook ALL my food from scratch. Sometimes I embellish a basic prepared dish to liven it up and make it a little healthier. I’m sure there are a lot of great, fairly easy pad Thai noodle recipes to create the sauce from scratch, but I don’t often have tamarind paste handy, and I found this easy, basic prepared pad Thai noodle meal from A Taste of Thai in my local super market and was surprised that it was relatively healthy (low sodium, no preservatives, no trans fat, gluten-free, minimal junk, etc.). Sometimes a green diva just needs to shorten the process. I made this delicious batch of veggie pad Thai for this Meatless Monday lunch!

The first thing I do is scrounge around for whatever yummy veggies I have on hand to chop and stir fry. Here’s what I came up with today: carrots, golden beets, red onion, red cabbage, broccoli, and of course garlic.

Ingredients

1 cup vegetables for stir fry (mushrooms, green onions, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, etc.)
2 Tbls coconut oil (find a healthy, organic refined coconut oil for stir frying)
1 clove garlic (crushed)
juice of half a lime
1 box A Taste of Thai Pad Thai Noodles

Instructions

After chopping all your veggies, stir fry on medium high heat adding the garlic towards the end, stir frying for another minute or two, then add lime juice and continue cooking for another minute or two. Take off the heat and prepare the pad Thai noodles as per instructions. When you have a minute left in your noodle preparation, add the veggies and mix it all up. Garnish with chopped peanuts (provided with the pad Thai noodle kit) and some fresh lime and cilantro (forgot to get some from the garden when I made this batch!).

enjoy!

eat. blog. be merry!