Spicy Peanut Noodles

Welcome to a KA quickie. This means that I forgot to measure anything, and only have very general guidelines for this dish—luckily, this also means that the recipe is VERY forgiving. This is one of my favorites if I am craving a noodle dish and didn’t plan ahead, since the base ingredients are always in my kitchen. The combination of creamy, rich peanut butter and spicy sriracha make a unique and tasty coating for pretty much any kind of noodle you happen to have. If you have vegetables or meat you want to mix in, go right ahead. Tofu, broccoli, and zucchini are some of my favorite mix-ins. But the bare-bones version is just fantastic on its own!

You need:

Peanut butter (creamy or crunchy)

Soy sauce

Sriracha

Onion, diced

Garlic, minced

Ginger, minced

Udon noodles (or whatever you want)

1. Boil the noodles.

2. As noodles are boiling, sauté the onion, garlic, and ginger until fragrant (aka you just don’t want raw garlic in here).

3. Get two of your biggest normal eating spoons and scrape two ridiculously large scoops of peanut butter into a bowl or a large high-sided measuring cup (I have a 4 cup measure that works very well for this—stirring is messy). Splash in some soy sauce—about a quarter of the volume of the PB. Now the messy part. Stir the peanut butter until it combines with the soy sauce. It doesn’t seem like this is possible at first, but keep going! It takes less than a minute until you can tell it’s combining. The finished texture will be creamier than the original PB, but still pretty thick.

4. Add sriracha to taste (start with less if you’re not sure…trust me) and sautéed veggies to the PB mixture.

5. Mix the sauce with hot noodles (this also takes a bit of doing, but the hotter the noodles, the quicker the sauce mixes in).

6. If you want to top with chopped peanuts, go ahead. Enjoy!