Peanut Sauce

How are we eating our greens recently? With peanut sauce.

With summer produce in full swing, gorgeous vegetables in our farm share, and a head of unloved cabbage in the crisper, I was reminded of Mark Bittman's 101 Simple Salads article. Searching for "cabbage" found me this:

20. Shred Napa cabbage and radishes. The dressing is roasted peanuts, lime juice, peanut or other oil, cilantro and fresh or dried chili, all whizzed in a blender. Deliciousness belies ease.

The cabbage wasn't Napa, and we didn't have any radishes, and we used peanut butter rather than peanuts, but you might have noticed that we pretty much just roll with that kind of thing around here.

(It was a tasty salad just as cabbage -- and yes, we served it to guests like that -- and even better with cucumbers and edamame added to the leftovers.)

Liz one-upped this, though, with her own peanut sauce, served with a lovely deconstructed-spring-roll salad.

Her peanut sauce recipe (peanut butter, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, maple syrup, soy sauce, garlic cloves, red pepper flakes, water if needed) shares not a single ingredient with Mark Bittman's, but similarly comes without any instructions or proportions.

The salad ingredients are finely chopped lettuce and celery, cold cooked rice noodles, defrosted frozen peas and Soycutash, and tofu blocks, topped with the peanut sauce.

(For those who prefer some instruction: Peanut sauce is better than 31 flavors of ice cream, Tyler Florence peanut sauce, CHOW peanut sauce, Epicurious spicy peanut sauce, and in our very own farm share newsletter.)