Peanut Butter Sauce

Anyone looking for a good peanut butter sauce to serve over chicken? I was. Until I came across this one from the lid of a Smucker's peanut butter jar. I had to make a couple of changes to suit our tastes and now it's WD's favorite dish.


1/3 cup natural peanut butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon garlic powder
red pepper flakes (I use one of the packets that Pizza Hut gives you when you order takeout)


Mix it all up until it's nice and creamy then pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds. WD eats it like gravy. It's that good. The original recipe calls for 1/3 cup of water. Way too runny, but you could certainly add more than the 2 TBS I use to make it thinner. The original recipe also calls for 1 tsp of sugar but given my affair with Dr. Agatston I decided to omit it and it still tastes great. Try it!

The Perfect Hot Chocolate

Today I share one of my greatest discoveries: the perfect, the ultimate, the best hot chocolate recipe ever. Last winter, I was fed up with all of the mixes sold in the grocery stores. They tasted weak, watery, and had absolutely no flavor. After doing some research online I came across a recipe from Jeffrey Steingarten's book It Must've Been Something I Ate. It sounded good and looked easy enough so I gave it a try. And....wow! It's just....wow! So good. You know that feeling you get when you see Shepard Smith on Fox News? That inexplicable giggle like a school girl giddiness? No? Really? Well, trust me, you'll never go back to Swiss Miss again.

2 1/4 cups milk
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder, loosely packed
1 3.5 oz dark chocolate bar, chopped (I used Dove chocolate and a mini chopper)

In a 2 quart saucepan, stir together milk, water, and sugar. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Add chocolate and cocoa. Whisk until dissolved. Put into blender for 30 seconds. Heaven.