Obviously, the best cookbooks are ones with lots of great pictures. I’ll pretty much only make a recipe if I can see what it looks like as a final product. My reason is that I’m inexperienced, so I like the added confidence that I really can make the dish if it just ends up looking like that. Easy peasy.
But what I can never quite get a handle on is that MY final product never looks like the picture. Maybe it’s my greenness, or maybe it’s false advertising.
Exhibit A: Pad Thai from Cookinglight Magazine

Now, this looks easy enough. Just a conglomerate of veggies and tofu –for which I fully-planned on substituting chicken. No prob.
Original Recipe:
4 oz uncooked wide rice sticks (rice-flour noodles)
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
3 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon red curry paste
3 garlic cloves, minced
1.5 cups chopped reduced-fat firm tofu (about 8 oz.)
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
Cooking spray
1 cup chopped onion
3/4 cup chopped broccoli
1/2 cup chopped carrot
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
1/4 cup chopped dry-roasted peanuts
Place noodles in a large bowl. Add boiling water to cover; let stand 10 minutes or until tender. Drain.
Combine vinegar and next 5 ingredients (vinegar through garlic) in a small bowl, stirring with a whisk.
Heat a large nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray over medium-high heat. Sprinkle tofu with salt, red pepper, and black pepper. Add tofu to pan; saute 8 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove from pan. Add onion, broccoli, and carrot to pan; saute 4 minutes or until tender. Remove from pan. Add egg to pan; stir-fry 20 seconds or until soft-scrambled, stirring constantly.
Return tofu and onion mixture to pan. Stir in noodles and vinegar mixture; cook 1 minute or until thoroughly heated, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Stir in juice, sprinkle with peanuts.
But then, I discovered I didn’t have rice noodles at home. Just whole wheat angel hair or spaghetti. Angel hair’s smaller, more like rice noodles, so in the pot they went.
I didn’t have cider vinegar to make the sauce, so I used rice vinegar instead.
I neither had tofu nor chicken. Vegetarian night it is!
I didn’t have broccoli or carrots, so I used the leftover veggies from a frozen bag medley of peas, lima beans, carrot squares, and broccoli. I also added a stalk or two of leftover bok choy, ‘cuz if I could put bok choy in everything, I would.
I had an egg, but since we’re going veggie, might as well be entirely healthy. I used a serving of egg beaters that equated 2 large eggs.
I neither used lime juice or peanuts; the first because I forgot, the latter because I don’t have any.
Instead of regular brown sugar, I used Splenda brown sugar because I have a bunch leftover from when I was on the South Beach Diet. You’re supposed to use less of the Splenda per tablespoon of brown sugar, but I used the full amount — because it worked really well in some brownies I’d once made, so why the hell not?
So, in the end, this is what MY version of the recipe looked like:
My Recipe:
4 oz. whole wheat angel hair pasta
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
3 tablespoons Splenda brown sugar
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon red curry paste
3 garlic cloves, minced
Cooking spray
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup frozen veggie medley
1 cup bok choy
4 oz. egg beaters
Place noodles in a large pot of water. Bring to a boil until tender.
Combine vinegar and next 5 ingredients (vinegar through garlic) in a small bowl, stirring with a whisk, or in my case, a chopstick. [Use 2 tablespoons of Splenda brown sugar here, instead of the 3 mentioned above. Otherwise, it's too sweet. My bad.]
Heat a large nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray over medium-high heat. Add onions, veggie medley, and bok choy to the pan. Saute 4 minutes or until tender. Make a hole in the center of the veggies, and pour in the egg beaters. Let sit until it stiffens slightly, then scramble with the stir-fry.
Stir in noodles and vinegar mixture. Cook 1 minute or until thoroughly heated, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and serve.
My version turned out two sweet, and a little watery. This could be because I used frozen veggies, but it was probably also due to the fact that whole wheat pasta does not soak up sauce as well as rice noodles. But it still tasted pretty darn good, and much better than the recipes I’ve tried before.
So the moral of the story?
I always improvise, so I should stop whining that my meals never look as pretty as the picture. On the other hand, improvising is the only way I learn things in the kitchen, and for that reason I’ll probably never get a picture-perfect meal at home.








