Thai noodles, coconut milk peanut sauce

The idea is go crazy all over the place. Peppery hot, sweet, bitter, sour, salty, fishy, smooth, creamy, garlicy, fiery with ginger, calming with coconut, aromatic with herb that goes up your nose like mint and cilantro, and unifying all that both pervading it and crumbled on top of it, peanut. A small amount of peanut butter, say a teaspoon, goes a very long way, it competes ably with strong flavors, garlic, capsaicin heat, ginger, and wins.

Thai noodles

In the style of Thai noodles, everything all at once, a riot, sweet, salty, hot, bitter, savory, tart, breathily aromatic through and through rolled in a peanut butter sauce.

Except this has avocado and Napa cabbage and pecans. 

What is this peanut butter sauce that is previously mentioned?

Well, it has peanut butter in it. Usually some kind of curry, but not here, a fish sauce too sometimes, or a piece of anchovy. It will have sugar and vinegar and water, sometimes soy sauce. It can include coconut milk, this one uses pasta water that is flavored with shrimp having been cooked in there. Sometime toasted sesame seed oil. This has chile flakes too. 

Spaghetti, peanut sauce

It's just noodles with a wild and wonderful exotic sauce prepared with a familiar component that predominates, if you don't count thee layers of chile totally predominating all over the place.

Overdid it a little bit there, and I held back with each chile addition too. Flakes were enough but then I added cayenne powder and habanero so POW. You probably would not like this, it's challenging. 

Sauce

* olive oil, not an Asian ingredient

* toasted sesame seed oil 4 drops, if 5 then the whole thing is ruined, start over. 

* chunky peanut butter, I have smooth almond butter

* chile flakes

* cayenne powder this is going too far

* habanero powder this is just plain stupid

* fish sauce small amount, 1/2 teaspoon

* honey

* mustard powder, this is similar to wasabi

* garlic in any of its multitudinous forms but fresh is best

* ginger in any of its multitudinous forms but fresh is best

* pasta water, or coconut milk, or chicken broth

The wheat noodles keep absorbing liquid so it must be continuously added at the table or else presented as soup. This gives you more chances to adjust the whole thing. I switched from pasta water to chicken broth half way through because it was getting too thin. Then I fortified the chicken broth with a few of the listed ingredients but not all of them and carried on. It's a very enjoyable meal. Simple because it's just noodles and sauce, but complex because the sauce hits every taste receptor on the tongue plus a few extra flavor niceties. 

This has pecans and cilantro. 

Thai noodles

Two strange and alien ingredients, tamarind paste and Sriacha sauce, that you cannot get on this planet and so a plate of thin wheat noodles exotic and delicious and enchanting as this is not available to you. Sorry to tease you this way, that was unkind of me. I shouldn't have done that. Now I feel bad.

Shrimp is coated with chile sauce and cornstarch and fairly burned in a very hot cast iron pan. That takes a minute.

Thin wheat noodles are cooked in salted water. That takes a minute.

A combination of prepared products is stirred together in a bowl sufficient to amount to about 2 tablespoons to no more than 1/4 cup which is 4 tablespoons. A light coating of this sauce for the noodles is the goal not a sopping wet bowl of it. 

Unless you're an insatiable pig, then by all means do, go ahead a make as much as you want. It's hard to go wrong unless you flip overboard with something ridiculous. 

* peanut butter

* Sriracha sauce

* tamarind paste

* fish sauce 

* brown sugar, any kind of basic sugar, palm sugar, etc.

* mustard powder

* crushed garlic

* minced ginger

* water, if you want it thinner, oil if you want it to have that palate covering thing, or if the noodles get too sticky, whatever.

An entire bunch of cilantro, about a cup picked

An entire plant of mint, or a whole package, a lot of mint.

That takes a minute. So we're at what, three minutes? 

Well, it took longer than that. I must have added wrong or lied, sorry about that too.

But I cannot be troubled by these minor character flaws of teasing and lying, for right now I have the fire-breathing cilantro and mint breath of a superhero. I can start fires with my Thai chile breath and put them out with my  aromatic icy herbal cilantro/mint breath. Fierce. Cats follow me around. And cilantrophobes turn away in fear and flee. The scent of cilantro and mint seeps out of my pores. 

I didn't have peanut butter so I used almond butter instead. Tahini works too. Anything like that.