Sounds more like Thai food.

I dunno. The restaurant was billed as Indian. I do know that whatever it was I was served, it was not satay...

Could I snort it ?

If you really wanted to, I suppose you could. It can be pretty spicy though, and the sauce is thick and gooey. I would think it would cling and burn in the nasal passages...

Plus the chunks of pork would make it hard to get a good snort.

Thai peanut sauce?

I know you said it was an Indian place, but the coconut milk makes it sound Thai.

Googling for "indian peanut sauce" and "indian satay peanut sauce" returns a lot of results. I get a lot when googling for "indian peanut sauce pork spinach coconut milk" too.

Is the place still open? Can you call them and ask them what the proper name for it is? A lot of places will rename their foods to something simpler, so they may have just called it 'satay' so that people would have a better idea of what it was similar to.


Damn now I'm in the mood for Thai or Indian food... :D

While coconut milk does tend to be a traditional thai ingredient, I do believe it makes an appearance in some Indian cuisine as well. Reguardless, to my knowledge, it is not thai peanut sauce, since that is a traditional dipping sauce for satay, which this was not even though that is what they called it. Unfortunately, this was some 15-20 years ago and I cannot remember the name of the restaurant or even where it was. I just remember the dish because I thought it was quite good, and I have attempted to replicate it many times. My most recent attempt included such ingredients as kaffir lime leaves and fish sauce, and I think it was close.

For most of my cooking attempts, I prefer to actually look up about four or five recipes and compare them, or if possible, find the dish on Wikipedia. While Wikipedia does not usually give you a recipe, they are awesome for giving you the general theory of any particular dish, which allows me to come up with my own interpretation, usually something that is pretty damn tasty.

For example, while I have never had traditional goulash, I'd like to think that my goulash has to be pretty close. It's certainly better then the Americanized version my mother fed me. Not that there was anything wrong with my mother's cooking...just...goulash really should not be made with hamburger meat and spaghetti sauce...

"satay" refers to the largely peanut based sauce as a rule, but it also refers in the broader sense to a style of cooking. It is indeed Indian, because this Satay dish is blended with Spinach (a vegetarian component) and just a bit of some type of meat. While this may seem a bit of a contradiction, it is really about textures of food, and keeping the Satay from overpowering everything it touches. This is also done with the coconut milk you mentioned.
Satay can range from watered (or milked) down "peanut butter" to something so hot (spicy) that it will practically melt the glaze off of your dinner plates.

As for finding a recipe for the individual dish, I doubt there is one "standard" recipe except the one used by the cook or chef who cooked the dish itself.

What you do have is the basic components of the dish, and a rough idea of how each is prepared and combined in presentation on the plate you had. I encourage people to experiment and discover their own versions of dishes they like. There are many fine basic books and recipes out there for the trying. So play around a bit. No one knows your tastes better than you. and once you discover a dish that you like and can cook well, that beats going to almost any restaurant, anytime.

Plus, the complements you'll get when others eat food you have cooked are unlike any other ;3

Bon appetit, Handsome!

See, that's what I thought about Satay at first too, until I researched it. Satay is actually a dish of marinated, skewered and grilled meat. It is traditionally served with a dipping sauce, commonly made of coconut milk and peanut butter, but there are many other dipping sauces it could be served with.

What I had then, and most recently attempted to recreate, was a dish similar to a curry, but tasting very similar to traditional thai satay peanut coconut dipping sauce.

Maybe there is no proper name for this dish because it was a fantasy of the cook who made it, but boy was it good and I will continue to look for a more formalized recipe of it. My most recent attempt at making it was quite good, and I will share it with you now if you should want to give it a shot:

All measurements are for one single serving

1) Start some jasmine rice going. It should take about as long to finish cooking as the rest of the dish, so do this first. 1/3 cup uncooked rice per serving.

2) cut up about 1/4 cup pork into thin ribbons about an inch wide and 2 inches long and maybe 1/8 inch thick. Mix a marinade of 1 tablespoon fish sauce with 1/2 tablespoon corn starch and toss your pork in it. Let it sit.

3) slice about 1/4 of a red onion into thin slivers, and about 1 clove of garlic. Heat some canola oil in a pan and saute.

4) Once onions are starting to look transparent and garlic is nice and aromatic, add 1 cup of coconut milk. Bring to a simmer. Add a healthy scoop of peanut butter(I used creamy - feel free to use crunchy or extra crunchy if you like!) - about 3-4 tablespoons. Add a splash of soy sauce - about 1 tsp and srirachi hot sauce to taste. incorporate all that and return to simmer

5) add your pork with the marinade. Let simmer, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile, slide up about 1 cup of fresh spinach into 1 inch ribbons across the leaf. After your pork is cooked through - probably 5 minutes, add your spinach and simmer until spinach is tender. Remove from heat

6) Serve rice in a mound, scoop out pork and spinach on top. Add any remaining sauce to taste. Enjoy! I like to serve this with some thai or indian iced milk chai tea.

[EDIT]

That should be slice up about 1 cup of fresh spinach.

Also, I didn't mention, but I think this dish would really benefit from adding about 1/8 of a cup of whole roasted, unsalted peanuts sprinkled on top of the dish at serving. I didn't do that, but I kinda wish I had and I will have to give it a shot next time I make this!

I've also lived in India and Thailand. I know very well what Satay is.

Oh. Well then, maybe what I had actually was a type of Satay then. I was under the impression that satay was a style of street cooking that involved putting marinated meat on sticks, grilling it over a charcoal fire and then dipping it in satay sauces, and that the peanut sauce was simply a common dipping sauce that had come to be known by the ignorant as satay...

Perhaps a Saag Paneer

Hmmm. I looked into that, and while it might be some form of Saag, everything I could find about paneer suggests that paneer is some form of cheese. This was peanut butter for sure.