Chicken and Spaghetti in Spicy Peanut Sauce

I tend to pick up a lot of cookbooks in bargain bins at grocery stores. Sometimes I get really great cookbooks, like Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen or... this one cookbook I can't remember the name of, which is orange and in the kitchen downstairs. I use those books a lot and have had far more successes with them than failures. Sometimes I get sort of cracked out cookbooks, like one I bought a couple months ago but haven't used called Colorfully Slim. It's actually a diet book, which advocates (of all cracked out things) eating a certain colour of food each day of the week. Some are sort of fun but useless (to me), like one I bought called Down with Boring Old Food because it's cover featured bright pink spaghetti with a floret of romanesco cabbage in it. There isn't a thing in that book I really want to cook, but I like having it on my shelf anyway.

This came from a cookbook called Eat Smart that I'd bought for $4 from a bargain bin. Just another boring diet book with a bunch of recipes in the back, which I'd hoped would be interesting. I haven't tried many things from the book because the first two attempts were miserable failures. First, there was the gratifyingly yellow Yellow Chicken, which was entirely flavourless. And then there was the microwaved curry debacle, Curried Root Vegetables.

Anyway, I'm trying to go through some of these cookbooks, so that I can get rid of those that have neither good recipes nor good information, and I decided to try out another few recipes before giving this book the (metaphorical) toss.

This, though not spicy enough, was really very tasty. It doesn't show particularly well in the photo, but the peanut sauce was thick with a luscious texture and really nice flavour of peanuts and ginger. I left my meal too long while photographing and trying to clean up some of the cooking mess and so it was cold by the time I ate it, but it was delicious cold. The carrots were crunchy and the chicken juicy and nothing at all went awry.

Probably I'll try a few more things from this book before deciding whether or not to keep it, but if I get rid of it, I'll definitely be keeping a copy of this recipe for some future date.