Chicken satay is one of my all-time favorites from the world of Thai cuisine. Its bright fresh flavors and subtle complexity make for a mouth-watering treat, and it is equally at home as an appetizer or entrée.

Chicken satay is superior when grilled on the barbecue. It gives a smokiness and crispness that can't be duplicated by any other cooking method. I've made it under a broiler in a pinch, but it's just not the same. And, there's a lot to be said for easy cleanup.

Most of the recipes I've found for Chicken satay are long and involved, and use a lot of ingredients. It doesn't really take that long to gather and use all the ingredients, but there's just something about a long list of eight to ten ingredients that makes most people pass by a recipe. Kind of like Mexican mole sauce. Fun to eat, too difficult-looking to make.

Fortunately, there's a product now available in even the smallest towns that essentially does the work for us, and reduces our list of ingredients down from 8 to 4. It's Asian curry paste. This is a magical combination of esoteric ingredients like lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves, as well as things that not everyone has around the house, like coriander seeds, powdered ginger and allspice.

All we need to do is thin the paste down with a little oil, sweeten it with a little sugar, and add a dash of fish sauce, which sounds strange but actually adds a lot of authentic flavor to our dish. Both the curry paste and the fish sauce are available in the Asian section of the grocery story. They also are available in natural food stores in small jars and in wholesale grocery stores in large jars.

The marinade can be made with almost any type of oil except extra virgin olive oil, which can overwhelm the subtle flavors and is kind of a waste of money in this particular recipe. Peanut oil is in keeping with our Asian theme, so we'll use that. If peanut oil is not available, canola will be just perfect.

Once our marinade is assembled, we'll marinate the chicken for a few hours and make our peanut sauce. Then, when it's time to cook, all the work is already done. Just heat up the grill and cook the chicken for a few minutes, coat with sauce, and you're ready to eat!

Thai Chicken Satay

You will need:

2 tablespoons yellow curry paste

2 tablespoons peanut oil

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon fish sauce

11/2 pounds boneless skinless chicken breasts

To assemble the marinade, mix the sugar and the curry paste together in a medium bowl. Add the oil, stirring to mix. Add the fish sauce and stir to mix.

Cut the chicken breasts against the grain in fairly thin strips, about 1/2-inch. Freezing the chicken for half an hour first helps hold it together so it can be sliced thin. Cover with marinade for at least an hour and up to 24 hours. Thread onto skewers, presoaking the skewers if made of bamboo. Try to keep the thickness uniform so the chicken will cook evenly. This can be done by pushing together the smaller pieces until they are the same thickness as the thicker pieces.

Grill over hot coals. Chicken will cook quickly, so keep a close eye on it!

Satay sauce

Because the satay sauce has a few more ingredients and takes a little more effort to make, we're going to make a large enough batch so we can refrigerate the leftovers and use the rest of the sauce at a later meal.

1 tablespoon red curry paste

1 tablespoon green curry paste

1 tablespoon oil

3 tablespoons brown sugar

11/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 tablespoon fish sauce

3 tablespoons lemon or lime juice

1 12-ounce can coconut milk

1 cup smooth peanut butter

Makes 4 entrees and about 2 cups sauce.

Sauté both curry pastes in oil over medium heat until they break apart and seem to dissolve. Add the balance of the ingredients and simmer until warm, about 5 minutes.

Like any emulsion sauce, if this sauce is over-reduced it will split. It turns out there's an easy cure for this. Just add water, about 1/4 cup at a time, stirring it in after each addition until the sauce smoothes out. If the sauce totally splits and the emulsion is totally lost, you might have to add up to a whole cup of water to rescue the sauce but it's easy enough to do, and your sauce will come back together like magic and be good as new. This is a handy trick for any cream sauce, too.

The chicken in this recipe is the equivalent of “medium” heat in a Thai restaurant. If you prefer mild, reduce the amount of curry paste in the marinade by half. And if you prefer hot, the sky's the limit!

Nancy Faubel owns the Village Roastery, 140 Coho Point, in Winchester Bay. Faubel won the 2006 Reedsport/Winchester Bay Clam Chowder Cookoff and competed in the 2006 Chowder, Blues and Brews championships in Florence.