Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Napa Cabbage, Chicken and Thai Peanut Sauce Salad

We inherited our friends' CSA haul for two weeks while they're out of town, which has literally been a life changing experience. My mom jokes about her "balanced lifetime" philosophy towards vegetable eating, developed to avoid guilt over my picky eating in childhood; the idea was that over the course of a whole lifetime, I'd eat enough vegetables. Well, this week has certainly made up for those early years - I probably have had more servings of vegetables than I did for the first decade of my life.

Today I chose to use the giant, gorgeous Napa cabbage from Tantre farms and made this delicious, hearty, healthy protein-filled salad, with an absolutely delectable homemade peanut sauce I found on the internet from a great site called shesimmers.com. This is my new favorite thing, and the chef/blog author says it keeps for weeks in the fridge. I can imagine a lot of other uses besides salad dressing too, like stir frys (fries?) or satays.

For salad:
1 head Napa cabbage
1 chopped green onion, mostly white parts
Black sesame seeds
Toasted sesame seeds
Unsalted peanuts
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cubed

Cut up green leafy parts of Napa cabbage into bite size pieces and put in bowls. Garnish with unsalted peanuts, black and toasted sesame seeds, and chopped green onion. Meanwhile, cook the cubed chicken pieces in a nonstick skillet with some olive oil. Put chicken on top of prepared salads and top with Thai peanut sauce, add sea salt and pepper to taste.

For Thai peanut sauce dressing:
1 13.5 oz can of coconut milk
About 1/4 cup of Thai red curry sauce
3/4 cup peanut butter (I used chunky but the original recipe says creamy)
1/2 tablespoon salt
3/4 cup sugar (I used a little less)
2 tablespoons white vinegar (can use cider too, just not red)
1/2 cup water

Combine everything in a saucepan and bring to a low boil over medium heat, whisking constantly.
Let the mixture simmer for 3-5 minutes.
Serve over salad.

Salad adapted from shesimmers.com, peanut sauce recipe at http://www.shesimmers.com/2009/03/how-to-make-thai-peanut-sauce-my-moms.html

1 comment:

  1. I did not know that you were part of a CSA.

    this looks yummy!!!

    ReplyDelete