Thai Inspired Peanut Pasta

In this Instructable, I will show you how I make a Thai-inspired pasta dish topped with a peanut sauce. It's very simple to make, and uses ingredients that you most likely already have in your house. And best of all, it tastes really good!

I hope everyone already knows how to cook pasta, but I'll run through the basics.

Fill up a pot with water, put it on the stove, and wait for the water to boil.

Pick your pasta. I used Whole Grain Rotini, but really any shaped pasta will work. I personally like the rotini since the sauce gets all stuck in the curls of the pasta. Pour your pasta into the boiling water, add a bit of salt, and stir. You should turn down the heat a little at this point as well.

I like the directions on some boxes of imported Italian pasta that read "Cook until done." How much simpler could you get when telling someone how to cook pasta? How do you know when pasta is done? You taste it, of course! If it's not too chewy, drain the excess water out of the pot and set the pasta aside.

Chop up an onion. Avoid your fingers.

It can't hurt to add more vegetables to the pasta. On different occasions, I've made this in the past with adding fresh spinach, basil, parsley, and bell peppers as well as the onion.

Here is my method of making the peanut sauce. I'm not giving any exact amounts of each ingredient, so make sure you give the sauce a taste once it's made. Add more of whatever is lacking if you're not satisfied.

Put a bit of mustard into a bowl. On this particular occasion that I made the sauce, I used organic spicy mustard. Any type of mustard does work, and there won't be all that much of a taste difference once with the rest of the sauce.

Next, add a scoop or two of peanut butter into the bowl with the mustard. I prefer to use peanut butter that hasn't been sweetened. The ingredients should read peanuts, salt, and possibly oil (as in the peanut butter I used). Both chunky and smooth peanut butter work perfectly fine. Use what you have.

Take some oil (I used olive oil) and slowly pour into the peanut butter and mustard while mixing with a spoon until the mixture reaches a smooth consistency. It really doesn't take all that much oil.

Finally, mix some soy sauce in with the rest of the sauce.

That's my basic recipe for my peanut sauce. Once the sauce is made, it's time to cook the onions and mix everything together...

Start cooking the chopped onion in a pan over medium heat with a little oil. Depending on your taste, cooking times here may vary. I like the onions cooked until they start loosing some of their original color.

Your onions should almost be cooked to your liking in a pan. Get your cooked/drained pasta, and add in the pan with the onions. Pour the sauce that you just made over the pasta, and give everything a good stir to get the sauce evenly spread throughout the pasta and onions. Give the pasta a taste, and if it still needs something, add some butter and more soy sauce to the pasta.

Once your satisfied with the seasoning, remove from the heat and dish the pasta out.

Freshly chopped garlic always adds wonderful flavor to food. I chopped about four cloves and sprinkled it over the pasta.

And the pasta is done. Eat it. Enjoy it. Be sure to experiment and improve the pasta!