Every now and then, or actually pretty often, I go out to the store and buy a bunch of ingredients to make a recipe, and then I forget about one (or more!) of them when I actually go to make the recipe. I guess that’s one of the hazards of making up your own recipes and not having a book remind you to use all of the ingredients. Anyway, that’s why my pad ped doesn’t have any cherry tomatoes in it. I’m pretty sure authentic pad ped has cherry tomatoes. At least every version I’ve ever had does. So I went out and bought a pint of cherry tomatoes, which was kind of thoughtless to begin with because I still had a couple of ripe cherry tomatoes on my plants out back. And then when I was doing the dishes I glanced over to see my lonely little carton of cherry tomatoes staring at me. Oops. If you want a more authentic dish, go ahead and throw some cherry tomatoes in towards the end. But I look at it this way: it was still delicious, and by forgetting an ingredient I inadvertently simplified the recipe. We all like simpler recipes, right? And this recipe is pretty darn simple. Curry paste supplies most of the flavor, but I did include a little extra garlic and ginger, because garlic and ginger are two of my favorite things. The sauce is a super simple mix of red curry paste and coconut milk. And because there’s a huge variation in the heat level of red curry paste, you can make it as hot as you like. The peppercorns add some additional little bursts of spiciness, and basil rounds everything off. I got a big delicious bunch of fresh Italian basil from the produce market, but if you can get your hands on some Thai basil, use that! I planted some in the backyard this year, but didn’t have the same luck with that as I did with my cherry tomato plants.
