Meal: tofu with peanut sauce and rice
Cost per person: $2.50
Preparation time: about 20 minutes, plus another 25 hands-off for the rice in the rice cooker
Leftovers: some tofu, a bunch of peanut sauce, and a bunch of rice (I deliberately made extra rice.)
Organic ingredients: tofu, rice, peanut butter, lime juice, oranges

A couple of weeks ago, we had friends in town. They took us out and treated us to Thai food, whereupon I discovered that Jeff loves peanut sauce. I had no idea. I also love peanut sauce, and it’s one of those things that should be easy to reproduce at home - if you have a good recipe. Previous attempts, pre-Jeff, had been… not so good. However, I had the Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates checked out of the library, it had a recipe for peanut sauce, and I decided to give it another go. (Side note: if you haven’t experienced the wonder that is the Moosewood cookbooks, check them out. They’re put out by the Moosewood Restaurant in New York, and focus on vegetarian cooking (with some seafood). I have yet to make a bad recipe for one of their books, as long as it had ingredients that we liked.)

Peanut Sauce

- 2 tbs soy sauce
- 2 tbs honey or 2 to 3 tbs brown sugar (we used the brown sugar. It was very good, but next time, I think I’ll try honey, just for comparison’s sake)
- 6 to 8 tbs fresh lime juice or white vinegar (I used 3 tbs each [lime juice is expensive], and it was good, but the vinegar really came through. Next time, I’ll start with 2 tbs each and taste from there.)
- 1/2 teas tabasco or other hot pepper sauce, or more to taste (I used about a teaspoon of Thai chili sauce)
- 1 teas ground cumin, optional (I added about 1/2 a teaspoon)
- 1/2 cup peanut butter (get the best peanut butter you can. This is not a recipe for your standard chock full of sugar and preservatives peanut butter. Use that if that’s what you have, but this recipe will be as good as the peanut butter, so it’s totally worth a trip to the local natural foods store to get the organic peanut butter out of the big tubs.)

Throw everything in a blender; combine. Taste. It actually ended up being a bit thin, so I added another tablespoon of peanut butter. This made a lot of peanut sauce - next time, I’ll probably go for half a batch.

The tofu went on the George Foreman for 5 minutes, and we served this up with brown rice that had been cooking away in the rice cooker, and an orange for me. This was really, really excellent, and totally easy. Peanut sauce is also good on pork, chicken, and all manner of vegetables.