Vegan pad thai

Connoisseurus Veg got me started on this.  I really enjoy Thai food, but I confess, I'm not a big fan of standard pad thai... something about the fish sauce turns me off.  I tend to gravitate toward pad see ew or pad kee mow when I have the option.  So when I saw a version without fish sauce, I thought, "Sign me up!"

I followed the CV recipe for Vegan Pad Thai faithfully for quite a while, only subbing the wider chow fun noodles for pad thai noodles.  Then I realized I was spending half my prep time just messing around with tamarind: rehydrating it, running it through a sieve, and such.  One night I was tired and rushed and simply reached for the rice vinegar, and I discovered it was a perfectly adequate substitute.

So if you don't have tamarind, or don't want to spend time on it, use a small amount of rice vinegar instead. The trick is to make sure the flavors in the sauce are balanced: salty, sweet, sour. I double the amount of sauce that CV uses, because my noodles never seemed quite flavorful enough.  Their method of heating the garlic, pouring the sauce into the pan, and adding the noodles to coat seems to work pretty well, though I remove the veggies from the pan first (there just isn't space otherwise).

What veggies do I use?  Carrot and summer squash cut into strips, bell peppers, and broccoli, usually.  Good additions would be cauliflower, cabbage, onions, baby bok choi, snow peas, firm tomatoes, celery, and other stir-fry vegetables you might think of.  I cook the carrot, squash, and broccoli lightly before adding them, just so everything gets done together, then it's into the pan for a quick fry, out into the bowl again, and the sauce and noodles go in.  The most time spent on this recipe is chopping the veggies.