Indonesian-Style Chicken with Spicy Sunbutter Sauce

Of the food allergens around here, the two that cause the ER trips are bean flours and peanut butter, so we don’t use either in cooking. For recipes calling for peanut butter, we substitute either cashew butter or sunbutter. In the past, to make “satay” style sauces, sunbutter has proven to be our favorite substitute, so I used it in this dish from James Peterson’s Kitchen Simple: Essential Recipes for Everyday Cooking .

This was a straightforward marinate-then-brown chicken dish with a satay style sauce. Would I repeat it? Well . . . not unchanged. We’ve made a chicken skewer with satay recipe from Make it Paleo for awhile now. The sauce is simpler, as is the marinade, and I don’t think any flavor is sacrificed in the process. However, the chicken on skewers tends to dry out some. I think a nice balance would be to use the process of scoring and marinating the thighs from Kitchen Simple, with a skillet brown and oven finish, but using the marinade and sauce recipes from Make It Paleo.


Browning marinated thighs:





And super fuzzy dinner pic (sorry – my camera just randomly has “bad focus” days where it won’t hold a focus):

I don't want to sound lukewarm about either of these cookbooks, though. James Peterson is a wonderful cookbook writer (check out his definitive book on sauces) and I will check this one out from the library again, for sure. Make It Paleo is the backbone of our diet, and we've cooked so many great dinners out of this one. When someone I know is trying to eliminate all grains from their diet, this is the first cookbook I recommend.