Almond Butter "Mmm" Sauce

Two posts in one day? Who am I?  A girl with time on her hands.

The hubs recently started his new night classes so what else is a girl to do by herself at home besides bake donuts and look through old dinner pictures and write about them.

Tonight I have a meal for you that I made a week or so ago, but am still stockpiling the sauce because it was that good.

If you haven't ever read the blog Peas and Thank You, you should.  Her blog is hilarious and full of good recipes.  This particular recipe was an adaptation of her "Noodle Salad with Peanut Mmmm Sauce."

I used to make stir fry meals pretty frequently but for whatever reason got out of the kick.  On this particular night, I whipped out a block of tofu.  Prepared it my favorite way.  Bought my new favorite noodles.  Added stir fry vegetables and my own rendition of Peanut Almond Butter Mmmm Sauce to make this...

Mmmm.  Slightly sweet. Slightly nutty. Slightly spicy.  Very delicious.

So here's how it goes.

First, make your sauce.  The original recipe called for peanut butter but I had almond butter on hand so I just went with it.  I also doubled the recipe since I knew it wasn't like for me to use crushed spicy tomatoes and canned coconut milk in another recipe in the near future.  Plus I heard the sauce kept well.  Throw all the ingredients in your blender and blend away.  I also added more soy sauce and lots of srirachi.

For the tofu...take a block of tofu and slice it lengthwise into 3 blocks.  Wrap those blocks in a towel and place your heaviest cookbooks on top of the towel/tofu to press out the water.  After 15 minutes, cube the tofu and place into a hot pan sprayed with cooking spray. Add some salt and pepper.

Cook the tofu until it is brown on each side.  I'm kinda picky about each side being brown, so I carefully (and time-consumingly) flip over each piece of tofu with a fork.   You can also just flip it around in the pan with a spatula.

Next, open your bag of frozen Asian veggies from Costco and defrost a few cups.  Add extra frozen broccoli for good measure.

Recently, I've fallen in love with this brand of pasta.

We eat the "Sweet Potato and Buckwheat" flavor pretty frequently with regular pasta sauce.  Honestly, it doesn't really taste like sweet potato or pumpkin, but the colors are nice, I like the texture, and they're organic.

Toss the tofu in with the noodles in with the veggies in with the sauce.

And garnish with some extra cilantro.  And crushed red pepper flakes.  And more srirachi.  We like things spicy.

Mmmm.

Pretty sure the hubs heated just the sauce up yesterday and ate it with tortilla chips like it was queso.  To each his own.

Almond Butter Mmmm Sauce

adapted from MamaPea

makes enough for 2-3 batches of stir fry noodles

1 cup almond butter

1 cup canned fire-roasted tomatoes in juice

1 cup canned lite coconut milk

8 tbsp low sodium soy sauce

1 packet of stevia (or tbsp of honey)

1 large lime juiced or 2 small

1 1/2 tsp minced garlic

1 tsp ground ginger

2 tbsp srirachi

Blend all ingredients together until smooth.  Add more soy sauce or srirachi to taste.