pad ke mao #1

This cookbook doesn't actually have a recipe for it, at least not by that name. Google doesn't have a whole ton either, but I found one and tweaked it a little. Absolutely no guarantees of correctness, but it tasted fine.

Heat oil in large pan. Stir-fry
    2 cloves garlic, minced
    10 phrik ke nu peppers, minced
until they just start to brown;
    1.5 c finely-cut broccoli
    1 bell (or hotter) pepper
    4 scallions, solid parts, chopped (non-essential)
for two minutes;
    1/2 lb chicken, cut up
for a minute;
    1 lb fresh rice noodles, wide
    2 T fish sauce
    1/2 T. sugar
    2 T yellow bean sauce (if I'd had it)
    4 scallions, leafy parts, chopped
until noodles are done. Turn off heat, add
    1 c coarse pieces of basil
    a few sprigs of cilantro, chopped
    handful of mung-bean sprouts
and feed to two people.

(This comes out about as mild as pad ke mao is allowed to be, IMO, which is not very.)

The challenging part here was massaging the noodles out of the 2ⁿ-ply brick they come in. They don't bend well, and they cohere better than they bend. I ended up warming them up in a bowl of water, which helped, but I theorize that the big trick is not to do what I did as my very first step, which was to cut the brick of noodle-sheet into noodle-widths. This multiplied the initial picking apart of ply-edges, which now dominates my memory of the process.