Easy Asian style peanut chicken in the Instant Pot electric pressure cooker

This recipe is quick, easy and delicious in the instant pot or other electric pressure cooker. This delicious chicken is fabulous on rice but since I'm currently doing the low carb thing, we had it on cauliflower rice. Having a sauce-covered main dish is key for me to not realize I'm eating vegetables instead of actual rice.

Ingredients:
2 tb of toasted sesame oil (I like this one from Trader Joe's)
1 tb of chopped garlic (I use this kind but you can use fresh if preferred)
3 chicken thighs, cut into 2 inch cubes
13oz can of lite coconut milk
8oz jar of peanut sauce (I used this kind)
salt to taste
3 TB of cornstarch to thicken sauce

Directions:
Turn your Instant Pot (IP) on saute, normal and let it warm up for 3-4 minutes. Add the sesame oil and the garlic. Saute the garlic for 2-3 minutes.

Pour in your coconut milk first, add the chicken and top with the peanut sauce and stir.

Turn the saute function off and turn the IP to pressure cook and set for 8 minutes. Make sure the vent is turned to "sealing." When pressure cook is completed, quick release the pressure.

The sauce will be pretty thin, if you want a thicker sauce, press cancel on the IP and change the setting to saute, high. Then spoon about a cup of sauce into a small bowl (I like to use coffee mugs) and add 3 Tb of cornstarch. Whisk it together until it's fully blended and add it back to the pot, stirring it in. Allow the sauce to simmer for 3-4 minutes or until the sauce reaches desired thickness.

Serve over rice, cauliflower rice or quinoa.

Over cauliflower rice for a lower carb option. I sauteed the cauliflower in sesame oil.

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Simple (non-authentic) pork wonton soup

Wonton packed soup!

If you haven’t visited your local Asian market, you really need to check it out! Though I sometimes find it a little overwhelming since I don’t know what 90% of the things they sell are for, let alone how to use them (packages are often not in English) if you look around a little you can find some really great stuff that is easy to use even if you don’t speak Chinese/Korean/Japanese J

My favorite aisle is the frozen dumpling aisle. In part because I know what they are and how to cook them but mostly because there are SO many different kinds of dumplings. I buy different ones every time I go there (hint: we never like the shrimp dumplings). However, I always make sure I pick up some pork wontons for making soup.

Full disclosure: my wonton soup is really, really not authentic. I have no idea how they make it in Asian restaurants but this tastes good.

This is an easy recipe and as such it’s not an exact science, I usually just throw it together and have put together the rough directions to share. If you aren’t a “throw it together” type of cook, power through, I promise you can do this one too.

Ingredients:

1lb mild Italian Sausage (I use turkey sometimes and pork sometimes)

3 stalks diced celery

Optional: additional diced veggies if you are feeling healthy! Options include onions, bell peppers, zucchini and mushrooms

1 cube bullion (chicken or veggie is fine)

1 tb garlic

1 tb onion powder (you might omit if adding onions)

Fresh ground pepper to taste

3 TB soy sauce

1 tb white vinegar

Water

A few splashes of fish sauce

Directions:

Remove sausage from casings and crumble in the bottom of a large soup pot (I use a 5 qt cast iron Dutch oven). Cook the sausage on med-high heat, crumbling it as it cooks (you might need to add a small bit of oil if the sausage is very lean). When the sausage is 50% cooked, add the diced celery and any additional veggies you’d like and all the spices. When the sausage is fully cooked, pour enough water in to fully cover the contents of the pot. Add the bouillon cube, soy sauce, vinegar and fish sauce. Boil 5-10 minutes.

Add your wontons and additional water so the contents are still covered and boil another 10-15 minutes until the wontons are fully cooked.

Makes approx. 8 bowl-sized servings of soup

Enjoy!

Pad See Ewe - the best EVER Thai dish

If you have ever eaten take out with me, you know that I have a strong preference for Asian food, both Thai and Chinese. Normally, I don't see the appeal in getting take out that I could make myself at home and my common refrain is "yeah, but that is just as sandwich."

I used to get Thai almost weekly with one of my friends. When I lived in DC, I also had the "Pad See Ewe Summer" where myself and a few other Pad See Ewe (PSE) enthusiasts went to many, many Thai restaurants in the District to see which one made the best PSE.

This delectable dish, goes by many different spellings - Pad Si Ew & Pad See Ewe being the most common. If you haven't tried it yet, RUN do not WALK to your nearest Thai restaurant. When you are totally hooked, come back here and we will try to make it at home together.

A word of warning, PSE noodles are the great white whale of ingredients. At least they have been for me, I have literally gone to 3-4 Asian groceries and had an unsuccessful Amazon search before I finally found them at a massive Asian Market called Li Ming's in Durham, NC, that I had been meaning to visit for the last year, for the express purpose of finding PSE noodles. Now that I know they have have them I will definitely be back.

Li Ming's also carries what is definitely the largest selection of soy sauce I have ever seen. I am not even nearly culturally equipped enough to shop at this store; I can only identify uses for about a 1/2 of the items they carry.

But the point is, if you cannot find the fresh flat rice noodles, you can substitute dried rice noodles. Sometimes, you gotta make it work.

My weekly Thai food eating friend, sent me a PSE recipe she made a few weeks ago which spurred on my desire to go to Li Ming's. I like to have "saucy" and "eggy" PSE, so I made a few alterations, I have put the recipe I used below with my alterations.

PSE

• 1 head broccoli, chopped
• 3 tablespoon Dark Soy Sauce
• 2 eggs
• 1 lb Fresh Flat Rice Noodles
• 2 cloves chopped garlic
• 6 tablespoons regular Soy Sauce
• 2 tablespoon sugar  
• 1/2 lb, your protein of choice, sliced thin or extra veggies
• 2 tablespoon olive or other cooking oil

If your fresh flat rice noodles are not pre-cut, cut them into strips of 1 inch wide. Chop your broccoli (Chinese or regular) into pieces. Heat a wok or large skillet to high heat and then add 2 tablespoons of oil. Drop in the chopped garlic and stir. Add your protein and saute to cook. While your protein cooks, mix your soy sauces and sugar together in a bowl on the side. When your protein is almost fully cooked, add your sliced rice noodles and pour you sauce over it, stir it together.

Push your noodles to the side, clearing a space to drop in your eggs. Put the eggs into the open space and scramble them until fully cooked, then mix them in with the noodles. Add broccoli and stir together. Let it heat in the pan for a few minutes to cook the broccoli and give yourself a little char on the noodles. PSE is not normally spicy, but if you want a little kick, add some cayenne pepper now.

The verdict:
Even with increasing the amount of sauce, I still felt it could have been saucier, so I'll need to work on that. I think this sauce isn't quite right also, it's good and it's close but it's not perfect. I might need a little fish sauce or oyster sauce, or something. I'm not quite sure yet, I'll keep trying! I also, did not include this in my recipe but I made mine vegetarian, so I added some cabbage and bean sprouts I had. Normally, I like my PSE with chicken but the veggies were good too! They soaked up the sauce nicely.

It was also surprisingly quick to make! I will definitely be making this again and keep fine tuning the sauce as I go.

Working on Thai food

I'm working on learning more about Asian cooking. About six months ago, I had Pad See Ewe for the first time and I'm a little obsessed. I started this week by making an impromptu rice noodle stir fry, my first time cooking with rice noodles. Be on the lookout for some Asian cooking recipes!

Beef Stir Fry

My cooking style tends toward the Mediterranean but we all need to branch out. So tonight was Asian night. Recently, I was at the grocery store and bought a steak. It was on sale, beautifully marbled and I had nothing to do with it but I bought it anyway and put it in the freezer.

Now it's coming out - to make steak stir fry.

Apparently stir fry is hard to mess up, because I had no idea what I was doing but the results were delicious. I started here but I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the sauce?!? The directions are horribly unclear but I had already bought ingredients planning to cook this recipe...so I winged it.

Ingredients

2 cups water
2 tablespoons corn starch
1/2 cup soy sauce (you can use reduced sodium if you want)
6 oz steak (I don't actually know what cut I used)
2 tablespoons of olive oil
garlic
Sesame oil (optional)
2 cups frozen pepper strips
10 baby carrots

Slice steak into strips, cutting across the grain. Boil water and mix in corn starch thoroughly, add soy sauce and allow the sauce to reduce while cooking the rest of the ingredients. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a large frying pan. Sear the steak with garlic and sesame oil and remove it from the pan. Cook frozen peppers in the pan with additional garlic and sesame oil, about 3 minutes before they are fully cooked add the carrots and return the steak back to the pan. The sauce should now be reduced (not thick, but thicker than is started out); add it to the pan with the steak and vegetables. Serve with white rice.

You'll notice my sauce diverges from my starting recipe, I tried making what I thought they wanted me to do and it was a disaster and I had to start over. This sauce had a great taste! I might try it again with some beef bouillon to see if it improves but I was pretty happy with the results. I served mine with the steamable frozen rice which makes for a quick evening meal.