Rice noodles and memories

The first date I ever went on with my husband wasn’t really our first date. But I’m gonna call it that for this story.*

We used to go to lunch a few times a week with another guy we worked with, but Mark wasn’t free that day. I’d just started a few weeks previously and we were all just getting to know each other. So we kind of looked at each other uncomfortably and said, well, uh, do you want to go to lunch anyway?

We went to Singha (which sadly closed a couple of years ago) on Clark Street for Thai. Before moving to Chicago I didn’t have a very adventurous palate. My mom had never taken me to an Asian restaurant at all during my childhood. So Chinese sweet-and-sour chicken was about all I’d done at that point. Turns out, though, I loooove Thai food. And it became a favorite lunch and dinner option for us over the years.

Scott’s favorite Thai dish has always been pad thai. When I think of pad thai, I think of Scott. (Well, when I think of satay, I think of him too. We always ordered that as an appetizer during our Thai meals.)

For whatever reason, though, I never thought about making pad thai at home. I made some tasty satay one time but since I never went for the pad thai, I guess it wasn’t on my mind.

Now that pasta has become a “red light” when it comes to gluten-free dining, I’ve been looking at other options and rice noodles have figured into a lot of the dishes. This one just looked so simple I couldn’t resist. I didn’t even realize how closely it resembles pad thai until he mentioned it during dinner. Now that I’ve tried this yummy concoction, I’m going to explore a more authentic version. I never knew what I was missing before.

He’s a smart cookie, my husband.

*Full disclosure: I already knew I liked him at this point so it may as well have been our first date. Our official first date consisted of a day browsing through Printer’s Row and dinner was at Ranalli’s, right next to my apartment, where he patiently looked through photos from my cousin’s graduation party I had just picked up from Walgreen’s.