wordy wednesday: peanut sauce

It's snowing. To put it mildly.

All the children are stuffed up and whiny and suffering from deep unhappiness of various kinds. I've read thirty five blog posts on how to avoid February burnout but I think it's already too little too late. Let the children paint in the middle of the day yesterday because I'd lost my will to live. Can't tell you how much I loath a room full of children painting. The water everywhere. The paint smeared on everything. The bickering. The torn paper. The enormous stack of pictures at the end of the day that aren't really nice enough to keep that you have to smuggle out because each child is convinced their seven paintings were glorious dreams. So I made peanut sauce. Too bad I haven't made it in so long the little girls didn't know what it was and were not apprised of the fact that it's supposed to be everybody's favorite food in this house. That's the baseline expectation for membership in the family. Know I posted the recipe years ago but I can't be troubled to go find it and you'll probably be wanted to make it when you can get past the snow to a jar of peanut butter.

Peanut Sauce

One chopped onion, a couple of minced garlics, an inch of grated ginger, sweated in a deep pot. I added five little sweet peppers, diced, a couple of diced carrots, and half a chopped cabbage at this point but none of that is necessary. Then, when the onions are translucent, add a jar of smooth peanut butter (no sugar, obviously, because that would taste really strange), two tablespoons of tomato paste and probably four or five cups of stock, assuming you want to feed ten people. If you want less sauce (and I can't understand why you would want to do that because this freezes brilliantly in little cups and gets better with time) you could do half a jar of peanut butter and half the stock. Once it's going along nicely you can add chicken--thighs are best but if you have an aversion to those you could do something else. If you want to be authentic you will go kill a chicken and dismember it and add it piece by piece to your pot, but I can see the snow making that route difficult. Plus, I've discovered that modern stores provide already dismembered chicken for you, so that's probably a sensible option. There you are, when the chicken is cooked through and the rice is done (unless you're carb free and then you'll want a big bowl and a spoon) you can eat it. Actually, it's fine to just stand in the kitchen and devour it with a big ladle and not tell everyone it's supper time. Oh! It's really delicious with red pepper and lately I've been squeezing a big lime into it, just at the last moment.