The challenge: to cook and blog all 115 recipes from this awesome cookbook, brought to you by the funny as fuck Thug Kitchen. To do this within a year. Only 8 days remain.

Today I am feeling thankful, and in the mood for Vegetable Pad Thai.

Nothing like a bit of sunshine and pad thai to make you realise you’ve got it good.

Imagine a life with no noodles. With no garlic. That’s just no fun at all.

So today I’m thankful for avocados. For limes. For asparagus. For cocktails and sunshine. For my big soft comfy bed. For friends and family and random strangers taking the time to read my crazy blog where it seems half the time I’m burning stuff, or dropping stuff. I’m thankful that my arm is getting better and that I can slice and dice like before. Life just ain’t the same without cooking.

I would also be thankful for bean sprouts but I couldn’t fucking find any, so this recipe is beansproutless. (No, that’s not a real word. Do I look like I care?)

First, I cooked the noodles. I hadn’t been able to get rice noodles so I used the others I could find at the store. Once they were cooked they sorta looked like brains. But don’t worry – these noodles were definitely brain-free.

Then I did all the prep work and chopped all the veggies and the peanuts.

Once all that was sorted, I made the dressing. It was dark brown, and looked almost like coke. I poured a glass of coke to see just how similar they looked, but it was still easy to see which was which.

I’d also been pressing some Tofu quietly in the background.

I fried that shit up real nice, till it was squeaking, and screaming for mercy. (Weird how Tofu does that isn’t it? Sorta shrieks at you when you press it down in the frying pan.) I also managed to melt part of my spatula while I was doing this because I hadn’t been paying attention, but what else is new. I’ve come to expect some casualties when I do my thing in the kitchen.

Once everything was combined in all the right ways I dished it up and served it to my family. It was a big hit.

Just look at those juicy noodles.

You can almost taste them can’t you?

I also made a child friendly portion with no garlic and green onions and other exciting things. Exciting for us adults, but at times a bit too much for kids who prefer cucumber, white bread, and other blander flavours.

 This made a great dinner, and was nice the day after as left overs too.

Our plates went from full to empty in no time.

Only 10 more recipes to go.

In the words of Julia Child ‘Bon Appetit!’