Recipe from The Modern Proper.
I’ve been having a craving for peanut sauce recently, and I also happened to serendipitously discover The Modern Proper recently (through this list of craveable soups, which I should probably just commit to cooking my way through), and so this African peanut soup was top of mind when I was looking for something hearty and novel to cook up on Sunday night.
In terms of weird-and-wonderful ingredients, this recipe didn’t require much, with the exception of natural peanut butter (just peanuts +/- salt), and an awkward two tablespoons of tomato paste (not going to lie, I considered throwing the entire can in).
I tried not to perserverate about the fact that the recipe called for an entire CUP of peanut butter (so that’s why prepared/restaurant sauces taste so much better than what I try to make at home), but I told myself it was natural PB after all.
The recipe prep was pretty much as indicated (we all know I’m a slow cutter, and I didn’t enlist a helper for this — it would match the time listed on the website if you did).
The only ‘modification’ I made was chopping and then pan-frying two chicken breasts until just cooked through and tossing them into the soup with about 15 minutes to go (rather than poaching from raw or using shredded rotisserie chicken, although I’m sure both those options would be delicious).
Verdict: we loved this recipe! Perfect for an indulgent (but still relatively easy) weekend dinner, with lots of leftovers. You could probably stretch the portions to 8 … if it weren’t so darn good!
Here’s my recipe versus reality breakdown:
| Recipe | Reality | |
| Servings | 8 | 6 |
| Prep time | 15 min | 30 min |
| Cook time | 30 min | 30 min |
And my ratings on a scale of 1 to 10:
- Ease of obtaining ingredients (where 1 means I had to go to multiple specialty stores and 10 means it was all in my pantry): 8
- Mess (where 1 means my kitchen imploded and 10 means I was able to get everything cleaned while the meal was cooking): 8
- Return on time investment (where 1 means took forever and only made one meal and 10 means leftovers and freezer meals…woot!): 10
- Taste: 9
- Overall: 8.5/10