start at the end

I suppose this is cheating a bit but I think it's an important lesson, so I am going to share it...

I've been babysitting a few nights a week. Thursday is one of those nights, when I got home about 10:30 last night, since I didn't have the chance to begin any of the cooking or prep for our party on Saturday I wanted to try to get a few things out of the way last night... then I had a thought... the most important thing to do first was what would be the most easily overlooked today... I needed to start by making Friday night dinner. So I did.

I made peanut sauce from this recipe I found that I've done once before and really liked

• 1/2 cup natural-style creamy peanut butter
• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 small garlic clove, mashed to a paste
• 1 teaspoon chile-garlic paste
• 1 tablespoon dark sesame oil
• Juice of 1 lime
• 1/4 cup water

I cooked soba and chopped up tomatoes, scallions, a yellow pepper and par boiled and chopped broccoli. Then I tossed everything together.

I kept some of the sauce separate so we cooked some chicken tenders on the grill tonight and had them with the left over sauce.

Since we spent most of the day in the kitchen (and ended up cooking until about 1 a.m. when we finally called it a night and sat in the hot tub before bed) getting stuff ready for the party it was great, when we were hungry, to be able to pull dinner out of the fridge and not have another thing to cook.