Please Accept this as
my entry in the BBQ Brethren "On a Budget" Throwdown.
When I saw this throwdown come up, I immediately thought of one of my favorite dishes from a trip to Indonesia years ago. Gado-Gado and Chicken Satay. Gado-Gado is a dish consisting of boiled (blanched" vegetables served with a peanut sauce dressing. We were staying in a company house at the time, and each morning, people would push their carts through the streets of the neighborhood selling fruits and vegetables. There was one guy who sold satay. Like this (not my photo).
He kept his raw skewered chicken in that compartment at the rear of the cart and cooked orders on demand. I was wary of the safety of the raw chicken, but the stack of skewered chicken was huge (and had to be relatively fresh), so we went ahead and ordered. We just brought it inside the the house and cooked a bit longer just to be safe. I had eaten quite a bit of street food on my trips to Indonesia and the single time in my life that I suffered from food poisoning was what I had to assume was bad cole slaw from a Tony Roma's in Jakarta that I visited on my birthday when I was craving ribs.:shock:
Well, I've made this numerous times since then and thought it would be a good choice for this TD. One thing that concerned me was the peanut dressing. Peanuts and the other required items are not cheap. I always brought back a bunch of peanut sauce blocks that you would mix with hot water, stir and serve. For a few years after my trips stopped, colleagues would always return back to the States with blocks in tow for distribution. In recent history, when I needed peanut sauce, I purchased the commercial jars from the asian groceries. I haven't found one that stocks blocks yet.
With that intro, I'll start my adventure. My plan was to get the majority of ingredients for my dish first and figure how to tackle the peanut sauce issue when I knew how much budget I had left. I was ball parking about $4 or $5 for chicken. My first stop would be H-Mart, my goto place for Asian ingredients and produce. My chicken would be purchased at Shoppers Food.
Purchases at H-Mart that were not used in this dish were carrots, tomatoes, and radishes. I did not use 2 limes, 1 pepper, 1 cucumber, and 1 potato. I only used one pack of the chicken. I used the larger package for this cook. I ended up not using the cilantro, as one of my guests does not care for it.
I had a number of items on hand which I'll describe in the relevent photo below. I needed 4 eggs for the Gado-Gado, which I included in my total ($0.138 *4) $0.55. I finally found bulk bean sprouts @ Harris Teeter, about 1/2lb @$.099, $0.62. I ended up keeping a third of the string beans after portioning out for blanching and did not deduct from my total (figure $0.45).
So my total calculated costs are:
H-Mart (11.29-4.67)6.62+ Shoppers (11.43-4.41)7.02 + Bean sprouts .62 + eggs .55 = $14.81.
My haul
The items below excluding the limes and potatoes are what I had on hand. The cottage cheese container contains chili powder which was a gift from a New Mexico friend who gets it regularly from home. I apparently did not present my jar of coriander seeds, but that and the fish sauce are fully depreciated. The fish sauce is maybe two years old and has some sediment. I smelled it, tasted it, and filtered it through a coffee filter(which is also fully depreciated as I have a metal filter in my coffee maker). I'm not going to tell you how old the coriander is, but I did crush, smell, and taste. I'll have to get more fish sauce soon. Coriander will wait till I need it.
The ingredients for my chicken marinade. Coriander, lemon grass, scallions, garlic, cooking oil, chili powder, tumeric, soy sauce, fish sauce. I only used one of the bunches of scallions for this cook. I saved a majority of the bulbs for the peanut sauce and used more of the stems from this bunch for the marinade.
My chicken. I thought I did a picture after I removed the skin, deboned, and cut into strips, but never happened. Sometimes, boneless and skinless chicken is worth the premium. I put the chicken in a gallon zip-lock and marinated for about 6 hours.
The start of my peanut sauce. Roasted peanuts, sugar, coconut milk, salt, oil, coriander, lemon grass, the remainder of the scallions, garlic, peppers (I was in a smaller store that had the tiny Thai peppers, but H-Mart only had Korean reds), soy sauce, oil, and chili powder. Okay, the peanuts. H-Mart sells shelled and deskinned peanuts which are perfect for this recipe, but they cost close to $3.00. The stores had roasted peanuts in the shell, but they were priced at $1.99/lb. A commercial sauce even after deducting items not needed would cost more than the peanuts. Even a package of mix would cost as much as it required coconut milk which I paid $0.99 for. Anything peanut was going to put me over budget. My solution:
I'm having dinner at Five Guys on Saturday night. I normally walk out with one of those paperboard containers with the leftover peanuts that I had been munching on waiting on my burger. I've been going there for years and know the manager. I told him about the TD and asked if I could take a few extra. 2 brimming containers just about fit the bill.:clap:
Starting my sauce
I had been timing everything and completely forgot about the requirement of blanching the vegetables for my Gado-Gado. It required hard boiling eggs (4) and potatoes to just beyond the point of firmness, then blanching the green beans and cabbage. Got that started and added more coals to the fire.
Chicken skewers on the grill. I think about 15 minutes total time.
Finished product, ready to be served. The salad contains chopped cabbage, string beans, cucumbers, bean sprouts, and shrimp crackers, with a drizzle of the peanut sauce. The small bowl on the left is a thinned version of the peanut sauce to add to the salad. The bowl on the right is my peanut sauce.
Please use this as my entry.
