WEALTHY IN HEART: Panee Muncharoen. |
I had assumed only the uber-wealthy, the ones with oceanfront mansions, three brand-new luxury cars, and live-in housekeepers, were the people to donate entire libraries to towns — usually after they’re dead. That was until Panee Muncharoen, a single mom living in a modest inland home, taught me how to make Pad Thai and incidentally, that real wealth doesn’t have anything to do with having granite countertops.
I arrived at her house, surprised to find that she had turned our one-on-one cooking lesson into a post workout feast for her cardio-tennis team, as well as a birthday party for their instructor. She already had the team packed shoulder to shoulder in her tiny kitchen assembling spring rolls. “You don’t use a cutting board?” I asked. She was chopping garlic with a cleaver right on the Formica. She explained she’d given the cutting boards to the spring roll team, and then joked, “Anyway, an excuse for new kitchen.” After we’d finished making the Pad Thai, as we were finding our places at the table, she brought out chicken curry, rice, and shrimp stir fry, which she’d somehow cooked in the three minutes it took me to find my seat. “I never do one thing,” she said.
At the end of our meal, after proudly reading a passage out of her son’s recently published memoir, A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (by Jaed Coffin, Da Capo Press, 2008), about discovering his identity in the Thai village where she is from, she showed me a picture of the new library she donated to the village three years ago. Astonished, I humbly asked her how she managed to do that. She said she had worked for 20 years here as a nurse. Then she pointed toward her heart, “It is what I wanted to do.” And with the American dollar going farther in Thailand than most of us can imagine, she could. Before we parted, she spelled her name for me, followed casually with, “In Thai, it means 'wealthy in heart.'”
Making Pad Thai
Cut a chicken breast into small, bite-sized pieces; roughly chop a cup of cabbage; thinly slice a medium yellow onion; slice six scallions into quarter-inch rounds and separate them into green and white piles. Smash and chop five cloves of garlic, and crush a handful of dry-roasted, unsalted peanuts with a rolling pin.
Boil a one-pound package of rice sticks (wide, translucent Thai noodles) just as you could spaghetti, but undercook them, so the noodles in the strainer still have some stiffness.
Heat a cup of canola oil in a large skillet on medium-high heat, and add the garlic, yellow onion, and the whites of the scallion. After a minute, add the cabbage. After another minute, add the chicken and stir and cook until the chicken is cooked through.
Add the noodles to the pan and stir in one after another, a half-cup of fish sauce, a half-cup of distilled white vinegar, a half-cup of sugar, and five raw eggs. Stir until the eggs disappear into the mixture.
Sprinkle the entire top surface lightly with cayenne, add scallion greens, peanuts, and a pound of fresh mung-bean sprouts, and stir. Remove from the heat, top with a handful of fresh cilantro leaves, and serve with lime wedges.
Ingredients can be found in grocery stores, either in the Asian-food section or in the refrigerated section, near the tofu.
Lindsay Sterling can be reached at lindsay@lindsaysterling.com.
