Recipe Source: The Peanut Butter Boy, www.peanutbutterboy.com
I saw this recipe that the Peanut Butter Boy posted a while ago, and it looked absolutely delicious. The name of his original was Indonesian Meatballs with Peanut Sauce. I love nut-based sauces, and I love meatball type dishes. I decided that I was going to make this for one of our Sunday open houses as an appetizer. Unfortunately, we didn't get as much of a turnout as we'd expected, so I didn't need the appetizer after all, and I wound up making this for dinner.
I made a lot of changes to the original recipe, which you can find here. The biggest change was the peanuts. I love Peanut Butter Boy's recipes, but every time I read his blog I have to mentally substitute almonds or cashews for the peanuts. I'm allergic to peanuts. I would usually have substituted cashews for the peanuts in a Southeast Asian savory dish - I'm not sure why I do that, the flavor just seems a little more "right" to me. That said, I really love the flavor of almonds and decided that I wanted almonds for this dish. The change in course - dinner for appetizer - gave birth to the next two changes. First, I changed the pork for turkey. When the dish was intended to be served at Open House, I wanted to accommodate someone who always says she's likely to stop by. This person avoids pork, so I decided that this would be turkey instead. When it became dinner the need to avoid pork was eliminated, but I already had the turkey. I used dark meat, because it's a little more moist and I didn't want dry meatballs. Finally, instead of a quarter cup of coconut milk, I used a full 14 ounce can. I could make a lot of noise about wanting more of a sauce to go with the rice I added, and it would be true. I really did want to have more of a sauce, to be soaked up by the rice and give that extra something to the dish. I also didn't have a use for the rest of the coconut milk that week and didn't want it hanging around in the fridge.
The rest of my changes were minor. I garnished with some dried coconut and I think I increased the cumin, because cumin is one of my favorite flavors. I served the meatballs over brown rice with saffron, which gave the dish a very nice odor. Unfortunately the saffron might have been a little wasted otherwise, because you couldn't see the color with all the sauce, but the flavor was still there and that's what matters.
So, what was the effect of all those changes? Well, first of all, I used dark meat for the turkey. Dark meat has more moisture and flavor than light meat, so I don't think that I really lost anything by using turkey for pork. Using the whole can of coconut milk certainly allowed the milk to get soaked up by the rice, which was part of the goal, and kind of increased the "comfort-food" level of the dish for me. Using the almonds did change the flavor of the dish. It gave it a slightly darker flavor, which probably doesn't make much sense but it's the only way I can think of to describe the way the tone of the dish changed. It became a little darker, a little earthier. Cashews I think might have been truer to the original recipe. Either one avoids the whole I-can't-breathe thing for me, although both obviously change the flavor of the dish.
Special thanks to Peanut Butter Boy for posting the original, and for letting me talk about it here.
