Terrific Thai? Here Goes Nothing
Last night I should have been out on the town. The plan was dinner at one of Danny Meyer's restaurants, such as Union Square Cafe, to celebrate my dad (*cough*and his wallet*) being in town. But alas, fine dining will have to wait. Instead, I cook.
As I've mentioned, I don't cook often. I certainly don't cook anything not found in one of the Giada de Laurentiis' or Mark Bittman's cookbooks. Last night the goal was to cook something not in any of the nearly 30 cookbooks I own. To decide what to cook I asked friends, family, and you my readers - thanks for the advice and encouragement. Eventually I decided to take a leap of faith on Thai food. Chicken Satay is a classic, and one that could be done in my huge NYC apartment kitchen (read: 32 square feet, not exaggerating here - we measured between courses).
A quick stop at Whole Foods provided all the ingredients we would need. At home, Scott and I quickly prepared the chicken marinade - a blend of yogurt, ginger, garlic and curry powder. We placed the chicken strips in the sauce to marinade for 2 hours in the fridge while we watched football (yep, I know my priorities!).
Regarding football, we temporarily pause this recipe to complain about yesterday's UT football game. Really boys? My chicken is marinating, I have a delicious Manhattan in hand (thanks to Scott) and this is the best you can do? Tisk, tisk. Glad that is over so we can go back to the kitchen!
2 hours later and it was time to make the peanut sauce and prep the skewers. For the peanut sauce we blended a mix of peanut butter, soy sauce, chili paste, brown sugar and lime juice in a food processor. With these blended, we added 1/2 cup of hot water, pouring slowly with the food processor running to thin the sauce to a perfect consistency.
Setting the sauce aside, we pulled the chicken out of the fridge to put together the skewers. This might be my favorite part of cooking - messy hands and getting to play with my food. After a remarkably quick process, it was time to fire up the stove and pull out the cast iron.
Cooking about 3 skewers at a time, I uncovered an important flaw in cooking this recipe without a grill pan. I do not own a grill pan (Mom - on the Christmas list), which is what the recipe calls for. So I turned to my go-to cast iron. As you can see in the pictures the skewers stuck out of the pan, making it difficult to cook the chicken through. We ended up cutting the end of the skewers to solve this problem, which worked much better. As you may have noticed from the pictures, I am a wimp when it comes to heat. The oil splattered quite a bit with every new skewer I added, so I decided to cook with oven mitts on and tongs as fingers - problem solved!
The final product was beautiful, but even more important it was delicious. I decided to serve it over some simple white rice, with lots of extra peanut sauce and soy sauce on the side. A true homemade feast! It looked like a lot of food, but quickly disappeared with the appetite we had worked up in the kitchen.
To go with our feast, I served dinner to Scott and my dad with a Cotes Du Rhone wine I've been waiting to open. While Chicken Satay might traditionally thought of as best paired with white wine, the fruit of the Syrah complimented the dish and brought out the peanut flavor nicely.
After a rest, and some more wine, it was on to dessert - fried bananas. We started with 3 bananas cut in half and a package of spring roll skins. After carefully wrapping each banana, I placed them in about a 1/2 inch of hot oil in a clean cast iron skillet. After turning a few times the skins cooked to a crispy brown, with a soft banana filing. Each piece was served with brown sugar and local honey drizzled on top. While enjoyable, after eating this dish my instinct is to stick to flambeed bananas in the future. The flavor of the cooked fruit was very similar here, but the spring roll skin added more chewy complication than additional flavor. Oh well! 2 recipes - 1 huge success and 1 experiment, not bad odds for a "non-cook".
Thai may be my biggest adventure outside my limited cooking comfort zone so far - and with it one of my best culinary successes. Chicken Satay proved to be a delicious, easy to make dinner for 3 that I will certainly try again. Confidence is boosted, kitchen is starting to look like a kitchen again - what adventure should I tackle next? Let me know your favorite experimental, ethnic recipes and I'll give them a try!
How do you clean you're cast iron skillet? We used ours to cook our chicken last night, but I wanted to give it a good clean first. Check out my short video tutorial, to be posted Monday morning, to learn my secret!
