Dish 6: Simple Chicken Satay

The dish

I love satay. I also love that by writing satay the way you do you also pronounce it the way I was always taught by my Dutch-Indo grandmother. In Dutch the word is pronounced with the accent on the "tay" part of it, which has never ceased bothering me. Yeah, I know, right? 

But anyway, back to the recipe. I love chicken, I love spice, I love rice and I definitely love peanuts, so this dish really couldn't go wrong.

The preparation

The trickiest part about preparing this is getting rid of the bones in the chicken thighs. I have to admit, the first thigh I butchered, I seriously butchered. But by thigh four, the bone started to come away more or less clean. A moral victory, although I did curse a bit at our cookbook author for the duration of thighs one and two ("Why couldn't we just have used chicken breast fillets?"). But I suppose that this entire journey is also one that should teach me a thing or two about cooking, and I have learned now that after getting really angry, I don't care much about cutting through bone/joints, ripping off skin and generally getting my hands dirty. Will that also do the trick when I have to handle the too-many-legged dishes? I'm not so sure.

Once you've chopped up all the chicken, it's a matter of preparing the marinade and covering the chicken with it. Then you proceed to leave it standing for quite some time.

What I found very important to keep in mind is that reducing any kind of sauce simply takes a lot of time. If you follow this recipe step by step, you might start on this part a little late. However, since I've learned from my past mistakes, I got my peanut butter and stock bubbling away quite pleasantly while my chicken was still marinating.

You may worry that this dish doesn't have a lot of vegetables in it, but that's actually quite alright. It contains a lot of onion and also quite a fair bit of tomatoes.

The result

What can I say? This dish's title lives up to his name (which is awesome!). It is simple, it has chicken and it has satay. 

Oh, and if you are a fan of spicy, you will love it all the more. Eating this left a tingle on my lips. Next time I might even add another red chilli. Delish.

Unfortunately, due to the heavy load of onion, my onion-loathing best friend was not as impressed with this plate of food as she was with the Mid-Weekend Beef Curry, but she still finished her plate and didn't hurl. That's quite a victory, I should say!

Next time

As promised and already announced, next time (which will be Saturday) I will prepare the Roast Beef with Winter Vegetables (p. 52) for my friends, and if it is hard and if after that my friends say it's disgusting, I will whack them with the roasting tin I made it in. Even if it turns out that it is disgusting. Not that I expect it to be, mind. :)

See you at our next elemental meal!

Oh, but before I end this, let me just leave you with this:

That's right. We're ruling this joint! (For now.)