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!

Nutty Pig Omelet

Just now, I was inspired by an awesome and easy recipe I saw on The Kitchn (a great blog that can be found on my list to the right). They found a vintage book on canapes and photographed some of the pages. Here's the original canape recipe, paraphrased (cuz 40 words is too much to type):

Baconnette Canape
-Bacon
-Peanut butter

Spread slices of uncooked bacon with PB. Roll together, poke through with a toothpick, and cook under a flame until the bacon is done. Serve by inserting toothpicks into an apple.

---

So here's me: "Peanut butter and bacon? Bacon, with peanut butter. ... YES."

My first idea for combining these is to use the dastardly duo as an omelet filling. Though I haven't tried this out yet, I'm thinking I'd fry up the bacon first, then crumble into a bowl with PB and a little milk to help smooth it out. Cook up the omelet as usual (I have no tips for you here...through my many attempts to make omelets, I inevitably end up with scrambled eggs). I'd suggest serving with a dusting of powdered sugar. Mmm. And of course, this dish must be called the Nutty Pig Omelet. You are hereby forbidden to serve it without calling it by its proper name.

On the flip side of the day, you could also use the filling as an ice cream topper...that would be so good...or if you are lucky enough to own an ice cream maker (I will get one someday!), you could TOTALLY ribbon the filling into vanilla ice cream. Can you imagine? Vanilla ice cream with peanut butter bacon ripple. Sign me up! By the way, if you attempt this, the rough steps are to first make the vanilla ice cream in the maker--meanwhile, put a large metal bowl and spoon in the freezer--when the ice cream hits the proper soft stage, pour it into the bowl and spread it out up the sides. Drizzle the filling all over, then fold the sides in over the top. Mix gently, because the more you do, the less the ripple will show. Then plunk it in a freezer container and freeze for at least 24 hours. You should totally call this Nutty Pig ice cream. And serve with more crumbled bacon and chopped peanuts.

YESSSS. Thanks to The Kitchn and that rad vintage book for the inspiration!