- Restaurant workers have always been there for us. – They’re worked long hours. – They’ve worked late nights. – They’ve worked holidays away from their families. – All to make sure that we’re happy and fed. – Now, it’s time to repay the favor. – Because of the COVID-19 pandemic millions of restaurant workers have either lost their jobs or had their hours drastically cut. – And as dining room across the country shudder, takeout and delivery are the last remaining lifelines for many beloved restaurants. – So here’s our challenge to you. – Yes. You. – The one in front of the screen. – With the hair and the shirt. Lucky bastard. – If you can afford it, order more food than you can eat in one meal from your favorite restaurant. – Put those leftovers in the fridge and make the most creative dish possible with them the next day. – Take a picture, post it to social media with #LeftoversChallenge and urge your followers to do the same. – We’ve all gathered together to cook with leftovers from our favorite restaurants to give you a few ideas. – And click that donate button to give directly to the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation. – Your money will go towards direct worker relief, non-profits supporting the restaurant industry and zero interest loans for restaurants to start back up again. – Why are we still here? – Let’s cook something, yeah? (upbeat music) Welcome to Mythical Kitchen where dreams are like leftovers, you put them in Tupperware, you store them in your fridge and you take what you need like memories in the microwave. Today, as part of the leftovers challenge I’m cooking with ingredients from my favorite restaurant, Anajak Thai, and the owner Justin Pichetrungsi has a short message for you guys. – [Justin] Hi guys, this is Justin. My restaurant’s a family run business. My father started it in 1980 and he taught me everything I know. Supporting your local restaurants means supporting the purveyors, the farmers, the people that run the markets. All the artisans that work with us, the fish mongers, the meat purveyors, the wine makers, all the distributors, and everyone involved here in the restaurant. Something that’s been important for us is to keep our little economy alive. That makes it all possible for us if you guys continue to help support us. So, thank you so much for your support. We’ll see you guys soon. Thank you so much. – We’re gonna go ahead and do a pad Thai waffle. We’re gonna take everything else and put it into a Crunchwrap. I may have bitten off more than I can chew here. It’s gonna be stupid delicious. If you’re following along at home. Snag the time codes right there or there depending because I’m not in my normal space and I don’t remember which way to point. Let’s get cooking, huh? Oh, that’s another thing I decided, I’m gonna go, let’s get cooking, huh? Like it’s a question. Thoughts? Let’s get cooking, huh? (bouncy lively music) All right, so, first off. I always look down and then look up. First off, street smarts. So, first off, I had myself an absolute feast from Anajak last night. It was incredible and now I have the leftovers to draw from. So, we have shrimp pad Thai that I’ve eaten all the shrimp out of, because you’ve gotta eat all the expensive protein first. What else do I got? Green curry, I ate all the solids out of the green curry. So now we’re just gonna take that sauce and we’re gonna reduce it down into like a really concentrated dipping sauce for the waffle. Dump that curry in a pot. Then we’re gonna stir it around until it’s nice and thick. So we have the waffle maker heating up right now. So when turning any leftovers into a waffle from my experience, and I have a lot of experience with this, you take an egg. You crack in the bowl and then you’re just gonna dump like, maybe a quarter cup of flour in there. I have a lot of experience cooking with takeout leftovers too because when I was a kid my dad used to buy 10 hamburgers from McDonald’s when they were 29 cents a piece on Saturday, and then I really learned a lot of ways to hack that. Turning McDonald’s cheeseburgers into bread pudding, that’s a great thing to do. So we’re just gonna mix the egg with the flour, and then we’re gonna take all this pad Thai, and we’re just gonna get it right in there. There’s a lot of oil in the pad Thai. So that’s actually gonna give it like a nice lubricative coating. Johnny and Amanda had a lubricative good time. I think that was in the SAT. (sighing) It smells so good. Where would you rather be, outside? Maybe, but, you can’t. I also have some leftover Southern Thai fried chicken, this is one of my favorite dishes in the restaurant. So not only are we making pad Thai waffles, we’re doing pad Thai chicken and waffles. That’s happening right now. As you can see, I ate all the fried chicken skin off of it and left the meat because that’s the type of person that I am. Just gonna shred some chicken. Throw that in there. Also comes with dipping sauces. Save the dipping sauces. One rule in the house, never throw away a dipping sauce. Get the waffle maker open. Oh, yeah it’s nice and smokey, and then you’re just gonna mix all the noddles together with that very thin type of batter. Drop it right in the center. Pat it out a little bit. You burn your wrist a little bit on the waffle maker but you don’t show pain because that’s weakness. Ow! Ow. All right, and then you’re just gonna crush the waffle maker down. So what I like to do, is I always keep a dumbbell in my kitchen. So you can start working out while you’re waiting for the sauces to reduce, it’s great. What you can also do is use it to weigh down your waffle maker. It’s like, you know, brick chicken. It’s like a French, pollo a la sal, dish where you take hot bricks and you put it on top of chicken. This is dumbbell waffles. This is like the bro version of French cookery. Julia Child, eat your heart out. Do you want to get jacked? Here’s my recipe for creatine trifle. All right, so the waffle’s smelling done. You always do the smell test to know if a waffle’s done. You want like a little bit of char on it. So once you get that little bit of carcinogenic burn smell, you’re gonna remove your dumbbell, you’re gonna do some obscure lift that no one, like, knows what you’re doing. Like the guy at the gym who’s just doing this and you’re like, sir, I don’t know what that is. Look at this waffle, man. You see it’s got nice, crispy edges. All the noodles, all that batter’s cooked. Do I try and lift it out with my bare hands? Oh, yeah, that is what I’m talking about. Ow, ow, ow, ow! Then I got that beautiful reduced Thai curry just nice and oily and bubbling. And we’re just gonna dip our pad Thai right in there. There’s you’re pad Thai waffle, we’re gonna dig into this. I need to clean this up, ’cause it really smells like burned grease which, I guess, my life kinda smells like burned grease. See, dreams are like leftovers and burned grease is like your sleep paralysis demon. Like, Annabelle, who lives in my bathroom. That’s sleep paralysis. When she screams at night. Oh, did we cut? Give it a nice spritz of lime. That’s always great on pad Thai, and remember I told you, never throw away a dipping sauce? ‘Cause we got Thai sweet chili sauce from the fried chicken, and we’re treating this like pancake syrup right now. I’m gonna dig into this. We also got our Thai curry. I’m gonna use that to dip. I like to cut my waffles into square quadrants, and then I like to eat it with my hands. Pick it up. All the Thai sweet chili sauce has seeped into the holes of the waffle. I’m gonna go straight without curry first. Oh, yeah, I got a bite of fried chicken in there too. The outside’s like a little bit crispy and caramelized but the inside, you see, all that dense noodle like when, rice noodles really congeal in the fridge. I’m going into the curry. That is incredible. Start waffling all your leftovers. Waffle all your noodles. You gotta waff your noodz. Pad Thai waffles is the perfect leftover appetizer for this massive curry brisket Crunchwrap Supreme that we’re about to make. (bouncy upbeat music) Oh, I gotta turn on my fires. All right, so now we have to start architecting the layers of our Crunchwrap. The bottom layer of the Crunchwrap between the tostada is always hot and then the top layer’s always cold. So, for the bottom layer, we have this massaman curry brisket, which is like my single favorite dish from Anajak. It’s so stupid good. It’s a peanut based curry, tons of chilies in it, and the brisket’s just fall apart tender. So that’s gonna be the perfect base. I’m just gonna add that with a lot of that delicious, delicious sauce. Right in the pan and then we’re gonna melt cheese right onto it. We got some whole chilies, get it in there. We’re gonna sweat our way through the Apocalypse. All right, we’re gonna take this, and we’re just gonna use our spatula to really break up that meat, which will gets easier as it starts to heat up. Oh, I got a potato in there, that’s lucky. Now, the cold layer. Some I’m taking some leftover prik king green, prik king green beans ’cause everyone knows you get, like, the vegetable side ’cause you think, like, I should have a vegetable with my meal and no one ever eats the whole thing, and I’m just gonna finely chop them, and then we’re gonna toss that into a bowl with some freshly shredded cabbage and a little bit of cherry tomatoes, and then I’m gonna dress it all, remember never throw away the little side cups of dipping. This is like, fish sauce, chilies, ginger, shallots. We’re gonna use that as a dressing, it’s actually gonna taste like a papaya salad. Take the green beans, put them in your bowl then you’re gonna shred the cabbage as finely as possibly. You’re gonna like use the knuckle of your hand as a guide. (knife tapping) That’s KFC level coleslaw. Toss that in your bowl. I eat so much cabbage. It’s incredible that I haven’t died of, like, methane poisoning from the farts accumulating in my apartment. That’s gross, don’t talk about farts while you’re cooking, Josh. People wanna know! I actually wrote a whole article once about farts where I interviewed like a gastroenterologists and he didn’t like all the euphemisms that I was using for farts. Guys, like, when you’re making air biscuits, and he was just like, this is my profession. I also referred to him as a fart sommelier at some point. (laughing) I see now that I’m the villain in my story. You ever start telling a story and realize you’re the bad guy? So we’re gonna add our cherry tomatoes into that. Then just take this super vinegary, spicy dipping sauce, toss it in. That is your dressing. Give it a nice toss, this is gonna be that beautiful, refreshing, cold and crunchy layer on top of your Crunchwrap when it’s got all that melted cheese and brisket. Now a Crunchwrap Supreme, a lot of people ask, what’s a regular Crunchwrap? None, they skipped that, they went straight to the sequel in the Supreme version. So now we’re gonna take the cheese, and just get that melting on top. We don’t wanna mix the cheese in, we wanna create a kind of layer and then the steam’s gonna melt that. All right, so you see the cheese getting nice and melty. Once that fully melts then we can combine all of this. I’m gonna put a layer of fried rice on the bottom to catch up all that delicious curry grease. Let us cook! No one knows that reference, it’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Do you know what I’m taking about? Where he goes, let us– (bouncy rhythmic music) Now, we gotta start crunching the Crunchwrap. Now, we need to start building the Crunchwrap. So, you’re gonna take a dry pan. This is very important, and you have to griddle your tortilla to get it pliable because there’s that signature six point fold that all Crunchwraps have that, but sometimes you go to like the B level Taco Bells, like, I call them, they’ll like, they’ll fold them and there’s like four and a half folds, and it’s all kinda falling apart, and they get the burned tomatoes and sour cream on the top. I can’t tell if you guys notice, I really like Taco Bell. All right, so this is nice and pliable. So we gotta work fast. We’re gonna take a small layer of fried rice. You wanna keep everything tucked in the middle because all the folds are gonna go around that. Now, we’re gonna take your cheesy brisket mixture. Look at that, oh, come on, where would you rather be? So we’re gonna get that layer down. The key is to not overstuff it which I’ve probable already done, and that’s fine. Oh, tostada layer. Separating the hot and the cold layers, very important. Then we’re gonna take some of that cool and delicious, refreshing salad, and some of that dressing’s gonna soak into the tostada, and then what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna start with one fold, and then pinch it with your finger. Another fold, pinch. Another fold, pinch. Keep folding, it’s actually a lot more intuitive than you’d think, and then you’re gonna find the last fold that should be shaped in a perfect triangle. Fold it up. Now, the key is you have to griddle this with all of they folds perfectly flush down. There we go and then press it into the hot pan. Let that griddle for about 30 seconds. You wanna get a little bit of caramelization on it but you don’t want it to burn. There we go, flip it, griddle it again on the other side. I wanna know what was going through the head of the person who invented the Crunchwrap Supreme. The kinda thing about that, like, a lot of people think about, oh, like, when Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. It must’ve been this incredible light bulb moment. No, no, no, I wanna see the person in the white lab coat in the Taco Bell test kitchen folding it into a hexagon and just going like, we’ve done it. We’ve revolutionized Mexican, with an asterisk, food, forever. Oh, I have a plate. Oh, crap, I had a plate. I found it. Nice, perfect, beautiful little bit of caramelization on that. Oh, that’s hot! You wanna let it rest for one to two minutes just until the inside comes up to a perfect medium rare. (pan sizzling) (alarm clock ringing) All right, so we have our beautiful Thai curry brisket leftover Crunchwrap. Just gotta slice into that. Very carefully. Oh, God, you can hear the tostada crunching. Wowzers in me trousers! Look at that! Holy crap! Oh, my God, all the distinct layers, you can see. You can see the cheese just melting and oozing. I gotta hot sauce this up and eat it, asap. Oh, my God! (clapping loudly) People think the addition of cheese to Thai food does not make it better and I’m not saying it does. When you get the spiciness from all this vinegary hot sauce coming through with all that fatty brisket, and the spicy curry with just like gooey, melting cheese. It is un-fricking-believable. The fresh salad on top. The tostada holds up so well. So you get the crunch, see if you can listen to the crunch. (crunching loudly) I dunno if you got that. It’s, give me a second, I’m sorry. (slurping) Wow! My job is done here and now I pass the challenge onto you. Safely order takeout or delivery from your favorite restaurant, and then cook the most creative dish possible with the leftovers, post it to social media with #LeftoversChallenge, and if you wanna donate directly to the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, click on that donate button, and be sure to check out all the other great chefs who took the challenge like Binging with Babish, Joshua Weissman, Internet Shaquille, and Alvin Cailan from First We Feast. And thank you so much for joining us in the Mythical Kitchen. We’ll see you next time. The Mythical Kitchen V2.0, we’re in my apartment, baby! Welcome to MTV Cribs, I’m X to the Z, Xzibit. We’re mixing up shows! Crib My Ride. Yo, dog, I heard you like apartments. So we put an apartment in your apartment so you can apartment while you apartment ’cause you have nowhere else to go, ’cause you got to apartment ’cause it’s shelter at home.