The recipe chosen this week for CEiMB, using Ellie Krieger's cookbook, The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life, was selected by Cathy at The Tortefeasor and is Chicken Satay with Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce, on pages 54-55.
I had been looking forward to this recipe ever since Cathy selected it, not only because it looked great, but because it is always even more fun to make a recipe that a friend selects! The recipe does not disappoint in the least...all the flavors combined with the grilled chicken to make an absolutely wonderful dinner. We all thought so...four out of four...it was a hit!
The marinade for the chicken strips went together easily, the chicken bathed in it for about two hours here as I had other things going on (i.e. our cookie jar was empty and Matt wanted Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, so I was multitasking with that), and once the chicken was grilled, I could have stopped right there because that marinade gave the chicken a very lovely flavor with a hint of everything that went into it.
In the recipe, however, Ellie had Part 2, which was a spicy dipping sauce, and that sent the guys raving about the chicken with that on it. Myself? Well, I liked it, and it did have a nice little kick to it, and I would make and eat it again, but I'm just saying that I was a happy camper even before the dipping sauce.
The dipping sauce is bold, a little spicy, and overpowers the delicate flavor the marinade gave to the chicken, so I could be happy with A) the chicken in the marinade and then grilled and eaten; or B) the chicken with no marinade and then grilled and eaten with the dipping sauce. In my mind, the sauce cancelled out the effect of the marinade by overpowering it. Just my thought anyway.
The beauty of this is that you could skip one of the parts and be perfectly happy with the outcome. The guys, of course, would vote for having the spicy dipping sauce every time. There will be a repeat. It was that good.
Next week: Waldorf Chicken Wraps, recipe found on the web here.