Awesome Fake Satay Sauce

I have 5 different Singaporean cookbooks with recipes on how to make homemade satay. None of these are helpful, of course, because I live in Arlington, MA, where apparently "good" Chinese cooking to the locals means the shit that comes out of a restaurant that serves a combination of Korean, Japanese, and North-South-East-West-Chinese food all side by side. Where am I going to find fresh lengkuas? Not in Chinatown. So, I set myself out a challenge - I wanted to find a peanut sauce recipe where all the ingredients could be procured at the shittiest little Stop and Shop in the world (coincidentally, the one located just around the corner of my house on Mass Ave). Enter allrecipes.com. Some genius made up a recipe for spicy ginger-peanut marinade. Credit goes to Athenia Prickett from allrecipes.com for inventing this delicious bastard. And now below you can sample my version, with adjusted proportions for those who like a little spice. Sure enough, you can find every ingredient on this list in some aisle at Stop and Shop.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter (if you're me, make sure it's penicillin-free - don't want another face-swelling incident like last time)

1/2 cup hot water

1/2 cup Taste of Thai roasted chili paste

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tbsp rice vinegar

1 tbsp minced garlic

1 2-inch piece of ginger root, preferably frozen for ease of grating

1 tsp cayenne pepper

Tools:

1 fork

1 measuring cup

1 cheese grater

Take a large bowl or container because this makes a decent amount of peanut sauce (enough to marinate around 3 lbs of chicken if that's what you're in the mood for). Plop in the peanut butter and whip in the hot water so that it turns into a thinner sauce-like base. Stir in the chili paste until it is well-mixed (if you're using Taste of Thai, their chili paste has seeds and chunks, so it's okay to have some bits suspended in the mix). Next add in the soy sauce, vegetable oil, vinegar, garlic, and cayenne pepper and mix. Grate up the ginger root using the second-largest hole size on your cheese grater (if your ginger is frozen, it shatters all the fibers nicely, and you don't have to deal with a nasty fibery mess on your hands when you are all done grating). Stir all that together, and voila, you have your sauce. This thing goes well on everything: marinate chicken in it and grill to make delicious "meat-on-a-stick" (ie: fake homemade satay - just baste the chicken with some coconut milk while it's on the grill, then use any reserved marinade as a dipping sauce); dredge a chicken breast in some flour, salt, and pepper and use this as a topping sauce; mix it up with noodles to make fake dun-dun noodles; pretty much anything - as Mike would say "wow, I could use this recipe to impress a girl!" Yes, Mike, yes you can.