Indonesian Peanut Noodles

Natural peanut butter is one of my favorite foods.  Not only does it taste so good that it’s addictive, it transcends sandwiches and chocolate cups to create lusciously creamy soups, sauces, and sautées.  PB is also easy enough to make yourself: just put 1 cup of unsalted peanuts, 1 tablespoon unrefined peanut oil, and a dash of sea salt into a blender or food processor and whir away.  You can determine how crunchy you want the PB to be by simply blending it until you reach your desired consistency.  Same goes for the salt level — you decide.  Or try various brands of natural PB until you find the one you like best.  (My favorite is the Trader Joe’s Organic Crunchy Salted PB.)

Indonesian Peanut Noodles with Carrots & Snap Peas
This serves 4. Recipe can easily be doubled.

4 servings whole-grain noodles (I used brown rice noodles, but 100% soba noodles — made entirely out of buckwheat — would be another great choice)*
2 carrots, peeled and cut into 1″ matchsticks
8 ounces snap peas
Drizzle of unrefined peanut oil OR extra-virgin olive oil
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 or 2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce, depending on how salty you’d like your stir-fry to be (be sure to choose wheat-free tamari/soy if you’re making this a gluten-free dish)
1/4 cup natural peanut butter
Juice of 1/2 lime
1 tsp. ground ginger
Fistful of fresh cilantro leaves (I adore cilantro, so I use a lot of it in my dishes, but you can notch down to a few stems’ worth of leaves if you’re not a huge cilantro fan)

Bring large pot of water to a boil and add pasta. Take a look at the cooking time required for the noodles, then subtract 5 minutes from that. When the timer goes off, add the carrots and peas to the same pot and keep simmering for another 5 minutes. (My noodles took 10 minutes to cook, so I simmered the noodles alone for 5 minutes, then added the veggies and simmered it all for another 5 minutes. This saves you from having to cook the veggies separately.) Drain noodles and veggies and set aside.

While the noodles and veggies are cooking, drizzle the oil into a pan and heat over medium-low heat for 1 minute. Add garlic and sautée, stirring often, for 3 minutes or until garlic is starting to soften. Stir in tamari and PB and let the mixture cook for 1 minute. Add lime juice and ginger and cook for 1 or 2 more minutes. At this point, the mixture will be fairly thick and bubbly, so add 1 or 2 tablespoons of water (start with one and see how it looks) to thin the sauce. You should wind up with a creamy, light-brown sauce.

Remove pan from heat and stir in cilantro. Toss sauce with noodles and veggies and serve immediately, garnishing with a wedge of lime if you’d like.

Enjoy!

* Both brown rice and 100% soba noodles are gluten-free, but whole-wheat noodles would work in this recipe, too.

Roasted Vegetable Salad with Corn, Snap Peas, Red Pepper & Sweet Potatoes

As much as I adore fresh, raw ingredients in my salads, sometimes I think roasting veggies makes them taste even better.  There’s something about that slow-cooked, vaguely-carmelized flavor that makes a roasted salad explode on my tongue in an ever-so-smooth kind of way.  And such salads are ridiculously easy to make — the veggies themselves are so pronounced and satisfying that you don’t even need to add dressing.  Just remove them from the oven, let cool slightly, and toss together.  The only thing you might want to add is a sharp, piquant cheese like sheep’s-milk Feta or a soft goat cheese.  Trust me, your dinner guests will think this is the best salad they’ve ever had!

Roasted Vegetable Salad

You can use any kind of vegetable you’d like — with the glaring exception of delicate greens, vegetables roast well.  Just be sure to put them in separate pans so that you can remove them as they’re done (different vegetables and different shapes have different cooking times).  I often use several pie pans since I can fit five or six 9″ ones into the oven at once.  Something long and slender, for example (green beans, green onions, or asparagus) is going to cook more quickly than something more dense and starchy (potatoes, turnips, or parsnips).  Separating veggies individually or by type will make it much easier for you to cook them to the doneness that you like best.

Get the oven heating to about 350 degrees F, then clean and slice veggies in whatever way you’d like.  Some — like cherry tomatoes or small- to medium-sized Brussels sprouts — you may wish to leave whole.  Kernels of corn roast beautifully (fresh or frozen); so do peas and carrots and onions and almost anything else you can think of.

Place your veggies into their separate pans or trays.  Toss with  melted butter (or coconut oil), sea salt, and freshly-cracked pepper.  Turn each piece to make sure it’s coated in oil and spices.

Bake for about 30 minutes before checking in on your veggies.  At this point, very slender cuts may be done; starchier or thicker-cut veggies may only be halfway there (or less).  It’s best to open the oven, pull out a rack, and stir the veggies with a wooden spoon so that you can get a really good look at them and determine how done they are.  In my experience, corn, snap peas, peppers, and onions take about the same amount of time, but again, that depends on how you cut the latter two.  After that 30-minute mark, keep checking your veggies every 15 minutes to gauge their progress.  Note that after you’ve done this once or twice, you’ll have a much better idea of how long things will take.

When veggies are done to your satisfaction, simply remove from oven, toss together, and serve.  You may want to add some Feta or goat cheese directly to the mix or let each diner add her own.

Enjoy!

I love snap peas and I love shrimp, so I thought, “Why not combine them?” And with the addition of the water chestnuts and baby corn, this stir fry hinges on the exotic. (Note: you’ll find the water chestnuts in the Asian food section at the grocery store. You might have to search a bit for the baby corn…or it might be right next to the bean sprouts and snap peas.)

The trickiest part about this dish is dealing with the snap peas–as their name implies, they’re crunchy enough to snap. This comes in handy when you’re pulling off the tough, nearly-inedible string that runs along the edge of each pea: just snap off the stem tip and pull down, pulling off the strings as you go. And when you’re selecting your peas at the market, bear in mind that exposure to air makes snap peas considerably less snappy–in fact, they get so limp that they’re impossible to de-string. This means that if you find the peas loose in a basket, shuffle your hand down to the bottom to get the peas that are still fresh and crisp.

For the stir fry:

1 large onion, sliced
1 cup bean sprouts
Large handful of snap peas, de-strung
About 6 ears of baby corn, left whole or cut in half
1 5-oz. can of water chestnuts, sliced and drained (you can usually find them pre-sliced)
Crushed red pepper flakes
3 T. soy sauce
3 T. rice wine vinegar
2-3 green onions, diced
1/2 lb. shrimp, shelled and cleaned

Rice noodles or rice (enough to serve four people)

Prepare noodles/rice according to package instructions. Set aside.

Sauteé the onions in 1 T. olive oil for about 3 minutes over medium-high heat or until almost translucent. Reduce heat to medium-low and add bean sprouts, snap peas, and baby corn. Cover and sauteé for about 3 more minutes.

Add soy sauce, vinegar, and a sprinkling of the red pepper (it’s hot!); re-cover and cook for another 2-3 minutes. Add green onions and shrimp and cook until shrimp is pink and curled. Watch it carefully–depending on the size of the shrimp, they could cook through in 2-3 minutes. You’ll know they’re done when the flesh has gone completely opaque. You could also use pre-cooked cocktail shrimp for this recipe, in which case just cook them for about a minute to heat them through.

Serve atop a bed of rice noodles/rice. Garnish with additional green onions if desired. You may wish to offer your guests soy sauce and dark sesame oil as condiments.

Enjoy!