Spicy Asian Salad

We like using tahini in recipes like hummus, but unfortunately it's a bit too expensive for how little comes in the jar, so we've been trying out several peanut butter substitute recipes. One of the latest was a spicy salad done Asian style using napa cabbage and Udon noodles.

Here's our base ingredients of cabbage, rice vinegar (the kind you'd use for sushi, not regular white vinegar), soy sauce, natural peanut butter, Udon noodles, sriracha hot sauce, toasted sesame sauce, and snow peas:

First we start by dicing the cabbage, along with some red bell peppers and carrots to form the base of the salad.

Next we mix together the sauce that will cover the salad using the peanut butter, sriracha, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and Asian sesame sauce. It's an interesting combination of sweet and spicy that you wouldn't normally get in either pasta or salad.

The Udon noodles need to be boiled for a few minutes first until they start to get soft and wiggly.

After draining the pasta, we pour some extra sesame sauce directly into the noodles.

Then we give it a good mixing!

Now it's time to start assembling, first by throwing in the diced vegetables and the whole snow peas.

We decided to add in some diced green onions at the last minute for extra crunch and texture.

Now the sauce gets poured in. We did this in two steps, mixing in about half of it, then pouring in the rest and mixing again.

And now it's finally ready to eat!

Here's our all-in-one meal containing the best parts of both pasta and salad for a refreshingly different dinner.

Using the peanut butter was good, but it's also a little bit too sweet, even if you use the natural kind with no sugar added. The next time we try this we'll be using the the peanut or almond butter straight from the grinding machine at Smith's. It's a little more expensive, but with no sweet ingredients at all I think it will provide a better savory flavor.