Campus Connection

Each month, we will feature recipes with affordable ingredients that are flavorful, yet simple.

This month’s recipe comes from The College Student’s Cookbook, a cookbook with simple tips and recipes that was written by Joshua N. Lambert, a college student at Harvard. Although this cookbook was written with the clueless undergraduate in mind, this book has plenty of useful tips that can drastically simplify the lives of the more sophisticated graduate student.

Written less like the typical cookbook with pages and pages of unrelated recipes, this book is more like a handbook for the kitchen, offering simple guidelines and tips so that readers can learn the basics of cooking and combining flavors to make simple, nutritious meals.

Designed for the culinary novice, the table of contents includes topics such as “The Fifteen-Minute, Twice-a-month Shopping Plan,” “The Fundamentals: How to Make Dinner 76 Nights in a Row,” and “Cooking for Dates and Guests” (in which the recipes for all of the courses of the formal meal are grouped together). The recipe topics are divided by mealtimes: breakfast, lunch, dinner (everyday vs. formal), “Recipes for 3a.m.” and “The Morning After.” The following recipe is from the section “The Fundamentals: How to Make Dinner 76 Nights in a Row.”

Spicy Peanut Sauce

This recipe can be used in a chicken and vegetable stir-fry or as a marinade for chicken (see below; also suggested for chicken cooked on skewers with chunks of pineapple, onion, and peppers).

Ingredients

1. 1 part peanut butter                          

2. 1 part soy sauce                              

3. 2 parts water                                               

4. chili powder (to taste)

5. garlic (to taste)

6. peanuts                                            

Procedure

Mix and stir the peanut butter, soy sauce, chili powder, garlic, and peanuts in a bowl, adding more water bit by bit until you get the sauce as thin as desired.            

Spicy Peanut Sauce Marinated Chicken

1. Thaw chicken filets

2. Prepare enough Spicy Peanut Sauce to cover the thawed, rinsed chicken

3. Seal the chicken in a container with a lid or cover a bowl with plastic wrap. Let marinate for 1 hour (on countertop) or overnight (in the fridge).

4. Let excess marinade drip off of the filets

5. In a frying pan, cook chicken about 3-5 minutes on each side or preheat the oven and place chicken in a baking pan in the oven until meat in the center is no longer pink (~350 degrees for 30 minutes, 15 minutes on each side).

Spicy Peanut Sauce Chicken Stir-Fry

1. Cut boneless chicken into bite-sized pieces and add them to skillet or wok. Cook for about 5 minutes.

2. Add spicy peanut sauce to the chicken and stir so that sauce coats chicken.

3. Add chopped onions and/or carrots and cook for about 3 minutes.

4. Add vegetables such as snow peas, peppers, bean sprouts, etc. that take less time to cook and cook for another 2 minutes, stirring frequently so that vegetables and chicken are covered in sauce.

Serve with rice (1 cup of rice: 2 cups of water; add rice and water to an uncovered pot and bring water to a boil, then cover pot and cook for another 20 minutes. Let sit for 5 minutes before uncovering).

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