Pad Sew

One of my all time favorite foods would be noodles.  Instant noodles were a staple in my diet until recently – they were cheap, filling, and tasty.  The MaMa Shrimp flavour were my favorite.  I still crave them, but the sodium content wasn’t doing me any favors (50% daily value per packet, and I tended to eat two at a time).

Since I’m avoiding instant noodles at home, my noodle consumption there is either spaghetti or kraft dinner with Alison.  Occasionally at work we’ll run out to Thai Express and pick up some noodles – I predictably get Pad Sew with beef.  I kept saying I needed to find a good Pad Sew recipe and start making it at home.

I finally got around to doing a search and locating a good looking recipe, then it was a trip to the local Asian grocery store to find some of the ingredients I needed.  While the recipe looks pretty complex, it turns out to be fairly straight forward – and the resulting dish is awesome.

Here is a replication of the recipe from the original source along with my comments.

Pad Sew (aka: Pad See Ew)
serves 2

300g flat rice noodle (rice stick)
1 egg
250g Chinese broccoli (or similar, I used bok choy)
2 cloves garlic, sliced
3 tbsp cooking oil (used roughly in 3rds during cooking)
1 tbsp thick (sweet) soy sauce (look for soy sauce with palm sugar)
dash of fish sauce
1 tbsp rice vinegar

Meat & Marinade
225g pork loin, cut thin & bite sized
1/2 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp oyster sauce
splash (dark) sesame oil

Prepare the meat & marinate, and let it sit for 15 to 30mins.  Chop up the vegetable (Chinese broccoli) into bite sized chunks, you may want to separate the stems from the leaves to allow you to cook the stems slightly longer.  Prepare the garlic.  Heat up some water, then soak the noodles until they are just soft.  Drain the noodles.

Heat up your wok, we’ll be cooking on high the whole time.  Have your sauces and ingredients ready, this goes pretty fast.

With a little oil, stir fry the vegetable with a dash of fish sauce.  You may want to start with the stems, then toss in the leafs.  When it all looks a bit wilted, dump the wok out into a bowl.

Now its time for Noodles.  Use a generous amount of oil, toss the drained noodles into the hot wok and stir the noodles to coat them in oil.  Add 1 tbsp thick soy and a dash of fish sauce.  Mix the sauce into the noodles to give them nice colour, add some more oil if things start to stick badly.  Spread the noodles in a thin layer over the wok and let them cook a bit.  Dump the wok out into the same bowl as the vegetables.

Some oil, garlic and meat go into the hot wok.  Stir fry the meat.  Once its browned nicely, spread the meat away from the hot part of the wok and crack the egg into that spot.  Scramble the egg and mix the meat in.  Once the meat and egg are cooked, dump the bowl with the noodles and vegetables back in.  Add the rice vinegar and stir things together.Time to eat.

Comments:

The fish sauce, oyster sauce and rice vinegar all play arole in making it authentic tasting, but I think the thick soy is the magic ingredient.  The type of noodle will make or break this dish – the second time I made it the local grocery store only had a thinner rice noodle which just didn’t have the same impact.  I’ve also used beef instead of pork and it was a nice substitution.

You’ll want to cook this in small batches – otherwise the wok won’t be hot enough to cook the ingredients as they should be.  The original points out some options for making this a vegetarian dish if you are so inclined.

Kids Picnic Table

At one point growing up if you asked me what I wanted to do my answer was that I wanted to be a carpenter.  I liked building things, I still do.  Of course, as I got older I realized that being a construction worker was probably going to be hard work so my tune changed.  That and my fascination with computers resulted in me being a software developer.  I still do like to build things.

The other weekend Jenn suggested that I build a picnic table for our daughter Alison.  It seemed like a neat father/daughter project.  Jenn dug up some plans from the internet and we built one.

Other than an electric drill, you can do this all with hand tools.  If you’re hard core – you can use a manual drill (I’ve actually got one!) and do without power tools.  Of course, as we’re cutting wood here you can get into power saws etc, but as I wanted to let my 3 year old participate it seemed like the fewer power tools involved the better.

Total cost was about $40.  I used white cedar from Lanark Cedar and weatherproof deck screws that I got at the local hardware store.  It took a couple of hours, but if your more organized and need fewer juice breaks you can probably get it built pretty quick.

I originally thought that the 1×3 and 1×6 wood called for by the plans would be pretty skimpy, but as a whole the table is pretty solid.  The table top is about 19″ off the ground, making it impractical for an adult to sit at it.  Thus, if you’re the right size to sit at the table – it will hold your weight.  We actually made the table / seats about 6 inches longer than the plans called for.  Overall it was a very satisfying weekend project.

CoolMax 3.5″ IDE Enclosure Review

A year or two ago, it was cheaper to pair together a USB enclosure and a drive than to buy a pre-built external drive.  Now with 1TB external drives around the $200 price point – if you want external storage, just buy a pre-built unit.

Of course, you might be like myself and have a stack of hard drives sitting on your desk.  I had a 60G drive looking for a home, and a 40G just sitting here gathering dust along with a handful of sub 10G drives pulled from older machines.  The 60G came out of an old server and it was a pretty loud drive, thus the reason I don’t have it sitting in my desktop machine which has a nice quiet drive in it.

In order to tinker with the NSLU2, I needed an external USB drive.  Instead of laying out a few hundred bucks, I figured the $21 CoolMax from ShopRBC would work until I needed more than 60G of storage.

I didn’t expect very much for the price, but the box was pretty sturdy.  Reviews on the net seemed to be pretty mixed, with a number of people having real problems with it.  I had no intention of using the one touch backup facility, or installing any of the supplied windows software – so that wasn’t a factor in the purchase.  Even for normal users, there is no reason to use the supplied software if you just want to use it as a drive – the USB enclosure should be detected and work without any problems without drivers on most modern (XP, Vista, Mac or Linux) systems.

Included in the box (working top to bottom, left to right): Power adapter, screw driver, usb cable, power cord (I got 2!), a CD with drivers, plastic stand, drive rails, manual, and the enclosure itself.

The screwdriver deserves special mention, its actually not junk.  The black plastic rails are designed to fit into the screw holes in your drive and slide into the enclosure.  Hooking things up is pretty obvious, but things are a bit of a tight fit.  Generally it feels fairly well designed.

Of course – it turns out my 1st unit was DOA which sent me back to the store for a new unit, this took a few days but the folks at ShopRBC made it pretty much hassle free.  The 2nd unit was another brand new unit, the only difference was this box didn’t have a bonus 2nd power cord – oh, and it works flawlessly.

The enclosure doesn’t provide any ventilation, and it does warm up to the touch – but no more so than the drive would running in a PC.  The power cord is a bit short, but again this isn’t the end of the world.  There are power and drive activity lights on the box.  Overall it does exactly what I’m looking for, at a very reasonable price.

If you’ve got an old drive around consider picking up an enclosure, just be aware there are IDE and Sata enclosures and you need to get the right type.