Asian Chicken Lettuce Wraps

Bountiful Basket items used: Romaine lettuce, Cauliflower, Lime

This recipe is quite labor intensive and takes a bit of prep time. So, I'm including lots of pictures to help with the first time you make it! This recipe comes from a lady in Hyogo-ken Japan - so it's about as authentic as you can make it! It's definitely worth the work!!

First off, make the sauce in a medium sized bowl: 1/3 C. hot water and 2 Tbsp peanut butter, mix till creamy. Add in 1/3 C. Soy sauce, 1/3 C. brown sugar, 1 clove of garlic minced (or 1/2 tsp of pre-minced garlic), 1 Tbsp Sesame oil, 1 Tbsp Sesame Seeds, 3 dashes of hot sauce, 1 tsp grated ginger root (or 1/4 tsp powdered ginger), 1 tsp fresh lime juice (about 1/2 small lime squeezed), 1/4 tsp lime zest (from that same lime), 2 Tbsp chopped green onion. Mix well! Pour about half the sauce into a separate container and set aside for drizzling.

Add to the remaining sauce 2 cans of cooked chicken breast (or if you want to make it even more labor intensive, you can cook and shred your own chicken). I use the Great Value brand of chicken and we like it a lot!Now comes all the washing and chopping!

Use the inner-most leaves of the head of Romaine lettuce (Iceberg lettuce tastes great too)!

Cut up about 1/2 C. of cauliflower. Chop it pretty finely so it can be easily sprinkled.

Grate up a few baby carrots (or any sweet carrot).

Chop up about 1/2 C. of peanuts.

Now for the fun part!! (Your kids will love watching this - just be careful with the hot oil!)

Heat about 3 C. oil (it says peanut oil - but veggie oil works okay too)

Add to that oil Chinese straw rice noodles (found in the Asian aisle at the store). Only need a small portion - they get much bigger as you can see by the pictures. Break bunches up a bit to put easily into the hot oil.
Using some sort of tongs, drop the noodles into the VERY hot oil.
If the oil is hot enough you'll see them immediately poof up

Use the tongs to pull the bunch out of the oil and put on paper towel. And continue with more bunches until you have as much cooked as you want.
The small portion that was originally on my counter - is now a mountain of poofy noodles!

Now it's time to assemble the wraps.

Take the lettuce leaf and put the chicken on it, topped with shredded carrots, cauliflower, peanuts and crunched up noodles. Drizzle with some of the remaining sauce!

We served it with mandarin oranges and had a great dinner!! (Be careful - it's messy!! Don't recommend eating this on a first date. :o)