Versatile Thai Peanut Butter Sauce

A quick and simple recipe that you can add to a stir fry, noodles, as a salad topper, or to season the portion of your choice. It's one of my favorite go-to recipes because it only calls for a few ingredients and I'm a sucker for anything with peanut butter.

Recently, I've used this sauce to season tofu (soybeans) and tempeh (fermented soybeans) with rice and mixed roasted vegetables on the side. One day I used the leftover mixture to drizzle over a vegetarian chicken salad and just added some water to thin the sauce to more of a dressing. I also made a buckwheat soba noodle stir fry with mixed veggies and the peanut butter sauce. Yum!

The meal pictured above is tempeh with the PB sauce, rice pilaf, collard greens (kohlrabi leaves sautéed in garlic and olive oil) and roasted vegetables from the garden (carrots, kohlrabi, zucchini, and eggplant).

So now that I've whetted your appetites, onto the recipe itself...

You'll need:

6 tablespoons of soy sauce

2 tablespoons of peanut butter (smooth or crunchy-both work well!)

2 teaspoons red hot chill flakes (add more for some zang)

2-3 cloves of garlic or 1-2 teaspoons garlic paste

1-2 teaspoons ginger paste

optional: dash of lime juice

Mix all of the ingredients together until smooth. You may need some water to thin the sauce, it really depends on what you're adding the sauce to. If it's for a stir fry then you probably don't need the water because the moisture from the vegetables (especially if there are tomatoes) will automatically thin the sauce out. If you're using the sauce for a protein, normally there's not a lot of extra moisture so a tablespoon or so of water can help thin the sauce out. The recipe above is for a larger batch, around 4 servings or a full skillet of pasta and vegetables. You can just it in half if you're making smaller portions or cooking 1-2 servings of a protein. For example, I use about half the recipe for 1/2 a block of tofu (cubed) which is around 2 servings.

I hope you all enjoy this recipe and get creative with what you decide to put it on!