Dinner Tonight: Chicken with Easy Peanut Sauce

Another night, another oooold recipe that I've finally gotten around to trying. This time, it's Jean Carper's recipe for Chicken with Easy Peanut Sauce. Mr. Fritz and I both liked this a lot, and since it lived up to it's "easy" title, I definitely plan to make it again.

Jean calls for grilling chicken breasts for 7 minutes. We don't have a grill, so I threaded bite-sized pieces of chicken onto four metal skewers and broiled them for around 8 minutes, turning each skewer once mid-way through cooking them. While they were broiling, I made the peanut sauce - you just put peanut butter, garlic, a bit of soy sauce, and some chicken broth into a bowl and nuke it for three minutes.


I plated the chicken with steamed pea pods and basmati rice and served the peanut sauce in a ramekin on the side. It made for a nice looking plate and each element was really good both individually and collectively. And considering there were four components to the meal, cleanup was still pretty quick.

Lunch today... Ginger-Sesame Chicken with Peanutty Noodles

Last night, Mr. Fritz and I completed all of our Christmas shopping. Yay! As a result, we were able to relax a little bit today, and I was able to make a decent lunch. So I decided to riff off of another recipe in the January issue of Real Simple: Chicken with Peanut Dipping Sauce. Their recipe calls for frozen breaded chicken breasts, which didn't appeal to me. I appreciated the peanut sauce recipe, however, and used it to launch my take: Ginger-Sesame Chicken with Peanutty Noodles. I started by boiling some Japanese udon noodles, which is sort of interesting, because to do so, you bring the water to a boil, add the noodles, then when the noodles start to rise to the top of the water, you turn the water down and simmer them for 10-15 minutes. Very odd way to cook what I think of as pasta!


While the noodles were simmering, I sauteed a couple of chicken cutlets in sesame oil, sprinkling them with ground ginger once they were in the pan. When they were cooked through, I removed them from the pan and threw in some Chinese pea pods and shredded carrot, let that saute for a couple of minutes, then added the ingredients for the peanut sauce: peanut butter, soy sauce, crushed ginger, fresh lime juice and brown sugar. After mixing that all together and sauteing everything for a few minutes, I added in the noodles (which I'd drained) and made sure it the noodles and vegetables were all nicely coated with the sauce and that it was all heated through. To serve, I put the noodle mixture in the bottom of a shallow bowl, then topped it with strips of the chicken. Good stuff, and very easy!

Dinner tonight... Asian Noodle Bowls with Chicken and Snow Peas

Happy Election Night! I'm spending the evening with Mr. Fritz, while monitoring my work email for potential meltdowns. Thus, dinner needed to be superfast. I went with another one of Everyday Food's November "On the Short List" recipes -- Asian Noodle Bowls with Steak and Snow Peas. The one big exception? I subbed chicken for steak and seasoned the chicken with a little bit of powdered ginger to add a little zing, but otherwise followed the recipe as written. Mr. Fritz really liked this one, especially the dry-roasted peanuts tossed on top as a garnish. It's going to be a late night. Hopefully by this time tomorrow this crazy election season will be over.