Days 9 & 10 - Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

Today's menu:

• Whole-wheat toast with peanut butter and banana slices
• Sushi (veggie and fish only, no cream cheese or other fun ingredients, and no soy sauce)
• Carrots and hummus
• Thai beef salad

Tuesday we allowed ourselves to have peanuts again, which was not altogether exciting. Neither of us has a peanut allergy, but we also don't eat them as much as we eat, say, wheat or dairy. So it wasn't that big of a deal. We did incorporate peanuts into two meals though, just because we could.

Wednesday we ate almost the exact same thing as Tuesday (substituting leftover pasta from Monday instead of sushi for lunch). We were going to reintroduce eggs on Wednesday, but we were just too tired to cook anything. So we didn't.

However, there is nothing better left over than this Thai beef salad. It was amazing the first night we had it, and equally amazing the second. Plus, as a leftover, it was much faster to prepare! Our only complaint about this dish was how long it took us to make it. The prep work is almost all active: chopping, measuring, mixing, etc. Which means we couldn't just set one thing to cook and prep other things in the meantime. But the effort was totally worth it. This dish was truly fantastic.

Wednesday Dinner - Chicken Satay

Tonight's menu:

• Sauteed chicken with peanut dipping sauce
• Cucumber salad
• Basmati rice

This dinner was extremely satisfying. The chicken is based on a Thai dish, but we used a recipe from my files that called for sauteeing the chicken rather than grilling it (since grilling is rather unpleasant in 20-degree weather). Unfortunately, I don't know where the recipe came from so I can't give proper attribution. If you've seen it somewhere, let me know!

The ingredients (for 4 servings) are:

• 1.5 lbs chicken cutlets
• 1 tsp Asian chili sauce
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp rice vinegar
• 2 tsp lime juice
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1/4 cup hot water

Cooking it was very simple. We just sauteed the chicken in oil until it was browned on both sides and cooked through. Then we mixed all the other ingredients together for the dipping sauce, and it was done! The cucumbers were just sliced and mixed with a little rice vinegar, lime juice, and brown sugar. A fast, easy, and delicious meal.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the rice. Normally I wouldn't even comment on cooking plain rice but tonight we discovered a new method that was so great we were both raving about the rice...just the rice! The instructions, from startcooking.com, involve adding some butter to the rice as it's cooking, and the butter makes a huge difference. The rice came out creamy and wonderful. If you've never cooked rice this way, I definitely suggest trying it.

A quick note: I really liked the peanut dipping sauce, but Matt thought it was too rich and too peanut-y. I'm thinking this could be toned down some by thinning it with extra water. It was a little thick for a dipping sauce, so maybe we'll try that next time.