Peanut Dipping Sauce (p. 570)

When we went to the grocery store we found pork stew meat BOGO free--so we got a couple packages. I didn't know what to do with it, so I decided to cook it up and coat it in a sauce that I found in TJOC. I read through the "Savory sauces, salad dressings, marinades, and rub" chapter and was highly interested in the Peanut Dipping Sauce (p. 570). I knew that we had most of the ingredients!

I immediately ran into a problem. First off, our peanut butter was so old, I think it may have been in the cupboard when we moved in. And the recipe says to use chunky, unsweetened PB...not only was this PB creamy (I don't like chunky!), it was honey roasted (so in all actuality, it was double sweet).

It seems like a waste to buy a new piece of ginger every time I cook and throwing half of it away, so I bought a tube of ginger. I also feel no there is no point juicing limes every time, so I used canned lime juice. I wasn't confident that this was going to be the same. Here is a picture of the three offenders:




The first step of this recipe is to brown the ginger, red pepper, and garlic (I used extra) in vegetable oil. Yum! It was already looking great.





You then add the rest of the ingredients. You wait for the peanut butter to mix in. If it's four hundred years old like my PB, it takes quite a while. It was already smelling delicious though.



The peanut sauce looked just like peanut butter, but it tasted GREAT! It was sweet and spicy and had a nice kick to it (likely from the red pepper, ginger, and garlic). I didn't add any peanuts or mint to it.





The sauce was GREAT on the pork. And I half-expected the pork to be tough, since it was "stew meat" and that can mean anything--but it was tender and delicious. The sauce even kept well, which was more than I expected.

I threw out the ancient PB and bought some new stuff--it's funny because I don't like PB and Josh likes the fresh stuff from Whole Foods so we only use the jars to cook with :)