Spicy Thai Sauce

Here is a great recipe for a spicy sauce to go with just about any combination of meat, fish, and veggies:

1 T fish sauce
1 t sugar
1 t soy
1 t chili sauce
2 T chicken broth
1 t minced garlic

This makes sauce for about 1 serving.

We have had it with halibut, chicken, pork, green beans, broccoli, bok choy, mushrooms, or whatever is left over in the frig. We usually serve with rice but it would be good with soba or rice noodles too.

Tasty Pizza

I'm trying to clean out the freezer and came across some peanut sauce I had made too much of and froze. Then I was looking through one of my favorite websites, Tastespotting, and saw this recipe for a Thai pizza. Of course I didn't have all the ingredients that the recipe called for so I substituted what I had and what I thought would be tasty.

For the fresh topping the recipe calls for carrots, snow peas, green onions and cilantro and I used slivered carrots, bok choy, red pepper, red onion and dried basil. This was terrific! Even good the next day eaten cold from the tin foil!

Next time I'll use a little more seasame seed oil on the fresh ingredients and add fresh basil. I'm not a big raw onion fan so I might lightly saute the onions but nothing else. The spicy peanut sauce and the fresh salad on the top was a good complement for the tastebuds!




Note to self - don't take a picture of something on foil – its much too shiny!

What to do with cantaloupe

We got a nice cantaloupe in our food box this week. I don't really like cantaloupe. It just tastes funny to me. Sometimes buy them and then force myself to eat them because I know they are good for me. But I'm sure I crunch up my nose when I take a bite. I don't normally eat it in public. So why did I think it would be any different to get an organic one in our food box? Good question. So I started to look around for some recipes so it would not spoil sitting on my counter.

I found a recipe for bread that said, "This is out of this world good - so moist you would
never suspect cantaloupe was used!" Out of this world, might be an overstatement, but they weren't too bad. I would add some nutmeg or cinnamon if I made them again.

We made some pad thai with a japanese eggplant and chicken on saturday night before Tim's brother, Marc, left for the airport. I thought I'd make a little spicy, sweet salad to go with. I used my fancy-dancy cut-myself-every-time-I-use-it julienne slicer and cut thin strips of cantaloupe and mixed it will a little crushed red pepper, and a big squirt of lime juice. I let it sit for a couple of hours. This was delicious and just the right cool, sweet, and spice to go with the dinner.

For the final pieces of that orange stuff I paired it with my other least favorite fruit a banana, to make a smoothie with some vanilla yogurt. I had some mixed fruit jam I made early in the summer so I added a spoonful of that to give it more flavor. YUM!