OK, here’s a suggestion and a confession all rolled into one.
A couple of months ago I was on my way from somewhere to somewhere else and I saw a hand painted sign on the roadside, (a very common sight here in Houston), that read “African Food, Yada Yada, Yada Yada, Beef Suya, Yada Yada”.
I don’t know why, but “Beef Suya” caught my eye. I used the hands-free, voice command to make note and when I got somewhere else, I looked it up and found it to be a beef on a skewer dish with a spicy peanut coating. I wanted to try this! A week or so later, my local grocer, HEB, had big hunks of prime sirloin on sale for like $4/lb or something so it was on.
I think I used THIS RECIPE.
So far so good. I make the kabobs and let them marinate a good long while and then grilled over charcoal. I made some saffron rice and steamed green beans for the sides and settled down to enjoy.
I took one bite and absolutely winced because it was so salty. I looked at the recipe again. One teaspoon of salt. That’s all I used. You hafta know that I love salt. I have a whole shelf of salt. I have pink salt and orange salt and black salt and smoked salt and hand harvested sea salt from several continents. But this was “Inedible”.
OK, so you’re probably smarter than I am and have already figured out that I used salted peanuts. I eventually used all of the beef as “seasoning” in other dishes I wanted to salt. I finely minced some and put it in meatballs, taco meat, etc.
BUT, I also had about half of the ground peanut coating left.
SO last night, I was looking for a side dish for a chipotle marinated grilled tuna steak, (over sauteed spinach), and I had a double handful of linguine leftover from earlier in the week. So, here’s what I did:
I heated some olive oil and tossed in some finely chopped onion and minced hot banana pepper and let that sizzle a couple of minutes, and added a couple of teaspoons of that peanut spice and let it brown through and turned off the heat, added the pasta and tossed. It was excellent.
Anyway, my suggestion is some type of pan fried, highly seasoned spicy side dish. By the way, with the addition of a little shredded chicken and a handful of fresh spinach it would have made a great entree.
Let’s eat!
