Preventing Self-Pity with Peanut Sauce

When I get home in the evenings, I'm usually ridiculously hungry. When I get hungry, I get grumpy. And when I get grumpy, the only thing I want to eat is chocolate.

So usually, I end up eating nothing and just wallow in self-pity about just how hungry I am while reading food blogs and Tastespotting. This generally doesn't alleviate the problem.

Since Dan usually gets home before me, he's been starting dinner so I have no choice but to eat well. However, there are nights when both of us get home late, or he goes to the gym after work and can't start dinner.

We've been using our slow cooker to its max to help out; we start a soup midday and it's ready to go around 7:30 or 8pm--right as I get home. Sometimes I pre-chop ingredients for a quick stirfry, or we have grilled cheese and apple sandwiches for dinner.

Last night, we tried something a little bit different: pasta salad! This isn't just a normal pasta salad, though--it's a peanut sauce soba noodle pasta salad from Smitten Kitchen!

Because the salad is meant to be eaten cold, I made it in the morning, when I was fresh, awake, and full from breakfast--the perfect time to cook.

You can find the recipe here. We used bell peppers, carrots and broccoli (we cooked the broccoli with the noodles), and used edamame instead of tofu. It was absolutely delicious--it was savory from the peanut butter and soy sauce, but tangy from the ginger. The sauce was creamy and coated all of the ingredients, but wasn't overly heavy.

Next time, I would use about 2/3rds the amount of noodle, and maybe a bit more vegetable.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or emailing me at piquantprose [at] gmail [dot] com.

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