creamy, nutty and versatile

There really should be such a thing as the Nobel Prize for Inventions in Food.

If I were on the judging panel (and I’d better be – I invented the damn thing!), my nominees would include:

• The brave pioneer who made the first daring leap between milk and cheese (“for a laugh, let’s just leave some milk out to rot and see how it goes”)
• The genius who came up with pistachio ice-cream (why haven’t I bought an ice-cream maker yet?)
• The culinary whizz who thought “y’know, what’d be good in brownies? BACON“. (oh wait, that was me)
• And the creative visionary who started making butter out of nuts.

I mean think about it – thanks to that guy (or girl), we now have cashew butter, almond butter, hazelnut butter, chocolate hazelnut butter, tahini and sunflower seed butter.

With all that choice it seems a shame to limit the base of a good satay sauce to just peanuts.

My preferred nut butter is sunflower (yep, I know sunflower seed is not a nut but go with it) and so that’s what I’ve used for this salty, sweet and aromatic sauce.

I added a dollop to a mix of shredded cabbage, onion and chicken pieces but really you can mix it in with vegetarian stir-frys, shrimp, beef or even lobster.

add it to chicken and greens for a quick, easy mid-week supper

It’s versatile and easy, the kind of thing you can knock together at the last minute, depending on what’s in your fridge.

We might not know their name, we might not even have spared them a thought before this but please take a moment to remember the inventor of nut butter.

We owe them a great debt.

Satay Sauce (makes about 1 1/2 cups)

• 1 tsp grated ginger
• 1 tbsp sesame oil
• 1 tsp fish sauce
• 2 tbsps sunflower seed butter
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 tsps lemon juice
• 1 tsp red wine vinegar
• 1 spring onion, finely chopped

1. Blend or whisk all the above ingredients together.
2. If you’re using in a meat dish, use half the sauce to marinate the meat for 1-2 hours and then add the remainder while cooking.

Like this? You might also like:

• Lemony Chicken & Quinoa Stir-fry
• Parsley Pistachio Pesto
• Sweet n’ Salty Almonds