Thai Inspired Gingery Peanut Noodles

Who doesn't love Pad Thai?  I went out to Thai food for lunch last Friday with some friends from work.  I am a big sucker for some delicious Thai food.  So after the lunch, I decided I had to make some Thai food at home.

Table
The recipe I used is not so much pure Thai food as it is "Thai inspired."  It's a simple take on a Chicken Pad Thai.  The recipe (similar to many of the recipes I use) is from Real Simple.  The actual recipe can be found here: Gingery Peanut Noodles with Chicken

There's a little prep work with chopping the vegetables up and making the peanut sauce, but overall, this recipe was super easy to make - and it mostly felt like it was just throwing everything together.

A couple days prior to making the dinner, I slow cooked 2 chicken breasts - about 5 hours on the high heat setting of the slow cooker.  I used one of the chicken breasts for another recipe, and the other chicken breast for this recipe.  They were pretty big breasts - after I shredded it, it was about 1 1/2 cups. If you didn't want to spend the time slow cooking a chicken breast, you could just buy a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket deli and shred it up.

For the peanut sauce, I used my trustee Blendtec.  It made the awesome sauce in no time flat.  Peanut butter, rice vinegar, soy sauce, & ginger all magically blended up.

Rather than using normal Pad Thai rice noodles, this recipe just used spaghetti - hence the "Thai inspired" rather than actually Thai.  I thought it still ended up tasting really good.

And here's everything right before throwing it all together.

The vegetables in this recipe are fresh and are not cooked.  If you put the meal together right after cooking the spaghetti, the heat from the spaghetti makes the overall meal warm.  And I kind of like the crunch from the peanut garnish and the fresh peppers.

How's this for a healthy colorful meal??  So delicious!

Tube
The recipe makes 4 servings.  For the blenderized version, I just took one of those servings (or 1/4 of the whole meal - a big heaping bowl full) and added it to the blender.

Because the recipe uses 1/2 cup of peanut butter, the meal already has a good amount of fat in it, but to help boost the calories, I did add 2  additional tablespoons of peanut butter.

I was a little worried about how thick this blend would be, since it had a lot of noodles in it.  It took a little bit of help at the beginning, but actually it blended up really well.

Here's my G-Tube blenderized version

Whole Milk	1 cup
Flavored Kefir - 1% milkfat	1/2 cup
Pineapple Juice	1/2 cup
Frozen Mango chunks	1 cup
Gingery Peanut Noodles with Chicken	1 serving
Peanut Butter	2 T
Children's Multivitamin	1/2 tablet
calcium chews supplement	1/2 chew
Volume (oz)	35
Cal/oz	29.7
Cal/cc	1.0
% Fat	23%
% Carbohydrates	53%
% Protein	24%