Recipe: Pantry Pad Thai

You will see an infinite number of holiday recipes this week. This is not one of them. Friends, this is a recipe for the day before you cook your festive meal, when you would otherwise stress-order carryout. Pantry Pad Thai is not authentic, unless you are lucky enough to have a pantry stocked with authentic ingredients. But it's tasty, healthy and just about the only thing that doesn't require time and effort this season.

Pantry Pad Thai has three components: sauce, noodles and add-ins. Start by making the sauce, whose magical mojo transforms yesterday’s leftovers into perfectly imperfect Pad Thai. Water, brown sugar, peanut butter and spices are the base. The remainder is made with ingredients I cheerfully improvise. Fish sauce gives authentic Pad Thai its distinctive umami flavor, but I’ll wing it with a splash of low-sodium soy sauce instead. No sesame oil? A teaspoon of convenient canola oil is indiscernible. I can’t justify buying rice wine vinegar when ubiquitous apple cider vinegar offers a similar sweet-tart kick. And my favorite easy-breezy swap is to use fresh lime juice instead of tamarind pulp.

Once we’re on the other side of the holidays, treat yourself with a visit to an Asian market for some of these specialty ingredients. Until then, I promise, these workarounds work.

If you don’t have rice noodles on your shelf, a pound of cooked soba or linguine noodles will get the job done. Simply prepare them according to the directions on the box, but leave the salt out of the cooking water; soy sauce will make your Pantry Pad Thai savory enough. As your healthy cooking writer, I have to remind you that whole-wheat noodles offer more fiber and protein than plain white pasta. As a working mother of three, I will also confess to making this recipe with repurposed macaroni and cheese noodles. There is no judgment with Pantry Pad Thai.

Unfortunately, zucchini noodles are the only noodles that aren’t a solid swap, which breaks my heart because I am Team Zucchini in every other circumstance. Alas, their high water content will make your Pantry Pad Thai too soupy.

Add protein by grabbing what you already have. I keep raw, peeled and deveined shrimp in my freezer at all times; they defrost in 10 minutes, and cook in just five. Shredded rotisserie chicken, chopped chicken breasts, diced pork tenderloin or cubed firm tofu all play nicely in this recipe. The same find-it, use-it principle applies to vegetables. Carrots, snow peas, even raw cucumbers are all delicious. And if you’re really scrambling, a bag of frozen broccoli steamed for five minutes in the microwave can be the hero of the dish. And you’ll be the hero of the evening for throwing together something so easy and tasty, it feels like a present to yourself.