This dinner we wanted to try some new dishes and focus on one specific type of cuisine, Southeast Asian Cuisine. We made Asian Short Ribs and Peanut Sesame Noodles.  What was cool was that there was a lot of overlap in ingredients betwen the two recipes: soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame, seeds, ginger and garlic were all used in both dishes. Also, the dishes both had a sweet indgredient to counteract the spice – brown sugar for the ribs and honey for the noodles.

Asian Short Ribs

For the short ribs, first we peeled and chopped the ginger and finely minced the garlic. We added that to a large bowl along with soy sauce, beef broth, sesame oil, and brown sugar.

Then we put the ribs into a slow cooker. After that we poured the mixture in and stirred it until it was well combined. We let if cook on high heat for 7-8 hours.  Then the recipe said to add cornstarch to the ribs and cooking liquid to make it thicker.  But the liquid looked like it had a lot of grease in it and we decided to try out our new grease remover (thanks Mike Holdeman for the recommendation).  We took all the ribs out and set aside.  Then we poured the cooking liquid through our grease remover.  The grease stays at the top and there is a lever at the bottom to release the grease-free liquid. It was pretty cool and we removed almost 12 oz of grease.  After that we added the ribs, liquid and cornstarch back to the slow cooker. We covered it again and let it cook (still on high) for the next thirty minutes.

We garnished the ribs dish with sesame seeds we had browned on the stop top.

Peanut Sesame Noodles

For the noodles, we cooked the normal fettucine pasta till al dente.  While the pasta was cooking we made the peanut butter dressing: we softened creamy peanut butter for fifteen seconds in the microwave. Then we whisked soy sauce, rice vinegar, canola oil, ginger, honey, sesame oil, lime zest/juice into a small bowl. We poured it into the drained pasta. (The dressing should be thick but pourable).

We chopped up peanuts and sliced scallions and half a head of cabbage.  And then we mixed the pasta and veggies in a large mixing bowl.  Finally we topped the peanut noodles with extra toasted sesame seeds (that we made for the ribs) and the chopped peanuts. Delicious!