Satay with Peanut Sauce Recipe

Satay is so good. Luckily for me there is a place that sells satay by the stick on my commute home. If I know that I am going to eat late or not at all I can pick up one or two sticks for a dollar and a quarter with a tiny plastic tub of peanut sauce. They do chicken, pork and tofu satay so depending on my mood I can pick and choose which animal or plant I want to die to satisfy my hunger. They gave their lives so that I may feast upon their dead and sometimes fermented flesh! Bwahahahah…cough.

This is also very easy to make at home using either a grill or the broiler. I prefer the grill because you get a wee bit of extra char on the satay. Of course the media tells us: charred food = stomach cancer! However the media also says that if you drink a glass of red wine with the charred food it will cancel it out. I think that is what it was, actually I don’t remember. I do know that this morning they said that red wine will give you liver failure (uh, duh, yes enough of it will) and coffee causes heart attacks. The benefits recorded by the earlier survey only count if you are a Provincial French Peasant Grandmother born under the sign of Scorpio during the new moon after an eclipse of the sun, in the year of the maddened goose, actually all geese are mad, especially French Geese. You have a whole pear rammed down your throat with a stick and see how you like it.

It seems that every day there is a new scientific study on the TV or the internet stating that this will give you mad ocelots disease and that will give you athletes head (ewwww...), drinking this amount of this antioxidant/vitamin/mineral supplement/powdered fishes swim bladder prevents Ludwig's angina in lab puppies in Argentina . Do you read the packets of food that you eat? I do, do you know how many products out there can cause spontaneous decapitation in albino vegetarian Norwegian super rats?

I am not saying that it’s not important or that it’s not a big deal. It is a huge deal, it is a big giant festering deal. The facts out there are staggering. Trying to separate the facts from the theories that have been put forward after forty dollars worth of illegal herbage is another situation all together.

Everyone will get sick with something in their lifetime, except in certain specialized circumstances. One of the great certainties of life is that it will end and we will head to the great Elks Club in the sky, hope you like accordion music and rock hard chicken fried steak! Personally after careful reflection upon my life, I am getting fitted for an asbestos suit; it’s going to be very warm where I am going.

But honestly please, please could we just stop with the reports of ridiculous studies; we know everything is bad for us in one way or another. Every study out there seems to show something different, if you read enough of them you might actually starve to death. All of these studies say: “…this study gives us new insight.” ok, show me the new insight? Where is the new insight? You call this an insight, this is just the mad incessant rambling of someone that just happens to have a whole Sesame Street of letters after their name? Hmmm? Thought so, you made it up! You fibbers! I’m telling Mom!

Why didn’t our ancestors get these many bizarre diseases? Oh I dunno, maybe it was the fact that the average life expectancy was 20? Why does the primitive tribe of D’jubringdebongalong seem almost impervious kidney failure? It’s because they are ritually slaughtered by the neighboring cannibalistic tribe who are trying to appease their god R’u-Gonnaeatthat.

Unfortunately the only way we could find a perfect cure all today is if we turned it into a reality television show hosted by some defunct celebrity has-been. Then again once a cure all was found, Al Gore and Kanye West would have to battle it out to decide which one of them invented it. We can't forget though that Reality Television causes brain cataracts.

Until then, I am not going to start living only on raw porridge and rancid yak butter because they are the only safe things to eat, and the porridge is questionable according to what I saw on the Tomorrow show. A life like that is not worth living, I am going to eat my red meat, my irradiated vegetables and my charred satay, I am going to drink my coffee and my wine and occasionally yes I will smoke a cigar, because I d@mn well want to. If you don’t like it you can lump it. So tomorrow if I walk out in front of a bus and end up like Tom Cruise, brain dead and dribbling on myself, I will feel fulfilled. However it is much more likely that like many men who live in America I will survive until late middle age whereupon I will die on the john, paper in hand with a strained look on my face and a depleted 401k.

Ahhhh mortality delectable mortality, give me liberty or give me socialized health care.

Oh yeah satay! How did I get on that rant?

This is a good way to use up leftover chicken, pork or tofu as with many Asian dishes it uses fairly small cubes of meat. Today I made tofu satay because I happened to have tofu in the fridge that needed eating up. So I thought I would do it a favor and do something special and easy. Just like me! Wait, that didn’t come out right…even if it is true.

Ingredients:

1 Pound of tofu, chicken or pork cubed

2 Tbs Peanut oil

1 clove of Garlic minced

1 Tablespoon of lemon juice

Peanut Sauce: 

2 Teaspoons of soy sauce

1/2 Cup peanut butter

1/4 Cup of coconut milk

1 Teaspoon to 1 tablespoon chili paste

Chopped green onion to garnish

Method:

Marinate the tofu, chicken or pork in the peanut oil garlic and lemon juice for 20 minutes or overnight if you have time. If you are using bamboo skewers soak them in warm water for at least thirty minute so that they don’t spontaneously combust during the cooking process.

Thread the cubes of whatever you have chosen onto the skewers being careful not to crowd them or they won’t cook evenly and everyone will be really disappointed. Grill the skewers for 7-10 minutes depending on what you have chosen to cook. While this is happening make the peanut sauce, combine the peanut butter soy sauce, coconut milk and chili paste in a small sauce pan, stir over low heat for about 5 minutes until heated through, it should be quite thick but still pourable, if you must add some water a tablespoon at a time to thin it out, stirring after each addition.

Arrange skewers on a platter and coat each with peanut sauce. Sprinkle with the chopped Green onion.

Serve with steamed rice and a side of cucumber salad posted earlier this week:

Serves 4