Cooking with Coconut Milk (Pad Thai and Pineapple Fried Rice)

I decided to try Nava Atlas' Vegan Express again (thank goodness for library copies) and, while it's still not my favorite vegan cookbook since it does use quite a bit of convenience foods (or, at least, condiments) vs. cooking purely from scratch, I must say that I really did need the "Express" part last week so I was appreciative of the recipes.  

I started with the Pad Thai since I loved pad thai at restaurants but haven't found a vegan version anywhere.  I was a little repulsed by the ingredients list for the sauce (lite coconut milk, sugar, lime juice, soy sauce and ketchup!!!) but it tasted surprisingly similar to "real" pad thai (though not nearly as good; I'm sure a very good vegan version is out there, but it wouldn't take under thirty minutes to prepare!) though my husband remarked it tasted a bit like soda.  When I asked him to clarify what sort of soda, he was unable to do so.  Perhaps he's had a coconut-ketchup soda at some point in his life!? Haha.  Still, he did enjoy the recipe and went back for seconds, so I guess soda-pad-thai is a good thing ;-)  Oh, and I did not have peanuts on hand but the dish really needs the peanut flavor to seem authentic so I just mushed in a bit of peanut butter and it was delish!

Since I still had half a can of coconut milk left over, I tried the pineapple stir-fried rice the following evening.  It was tasty, but even better as left-overs the next day as the flavors had a chance to mingle overnight.  (Picture is dark as I snapped this at night and couldn't get the shadow out, sorry.)

I think both recipes would take on a bit of tofu nicely.  Since there is usually egg in the pad thai, it would be a familiar consistency and it would be nice to add more protein to these for main dishes.