Orange Ginger Dipping Sauce

Happy Hump Day to everyone!  This week seems to be going by fairly quickly for me.  Most of our free time this week has been spent relaxing at home watching Netflix or reading on the couch.  Yesterday evening we met up with some friends at our regular bar that sells pints of Alaskan beer for $1, a poor recent-graduate's dream hehe!

Afterwards, we brought the party over to one of Kevin's favorite restaurants in town, Flamin' Joes, a place that specializes in spicy wings.  We've been there over a dozen times in the last couple of months, but this time Kevin finally decided to take their "Code Red Challenge", also known as the "Widow-Maker" (comforting, I know...).  He successfully ate a dozen of their hottest wings in 4 minutes, with a 4 minute waiting period afterwards of not eating or drinking anything.  While this awesome culinary feat won him a t-shirt and his picture on the wall, I couldn't help thinking how terrible this is for him.

Late last night Kevin woke up with horrible stomach pains: "Like someone punched me in the stomach."  I felt so terrible for him and tried suggesting anything I could think of to help elevate the pain.  I finally settled on getting him a glass of water with a bunch of lemon juice in it.  My thoughts were to hopefully reduce the acidity in his stomach with lemon juice, which is acidic outside of the body, but becomes alkaline within.  It made him feel slightly better, but he still tossed and turned all night.

This whole event got me thinking this morning about what foods really do to us inside of our bodies.  When you think about the whole concept of eating, it is actually quite strange.  We are making the conscious decision to take a foreign object, which was once a functioning organism, and put it into our bodies to utilize the caloric energy and nutrients for ourselves.  When someone gets a tattoo, or their hair cut or dyed, usually a lot of thought goes into the permanence of it, and how it is going to affect you in the long-run.  But with food, most of the time we don't think twice about what we put into our bodies or how it is going to affect us long-term.  Nothing can be more permanent than what physically builds us.  Well, just some food for thought!  Now on to the food....

Ingredients:

• 1 c garbanzo beans
• 1 orange peeled
• 1/2 c peanut butter
• 1 to 4 Tbsp rice vinegar (to taste)
• 2 Tbsp low sodium soy sauce
• 2 tsp minced ginger (more to taste)
• red pepper flakes, as desired
• 1 tsp sesame oil (optional)
• non-dairy milk to thin
• sesame seeds

Directions:

1. Place all ingredients in a blender, except for the red pepper flakes and almond milk.
2. Blend on high until smooth, adding almond milk to thin if needed to obtain desired consistency. 
3. Lastly, add the red pepper flakes as desired, and give it a quick stir in the blender.
4. Serve chilled and topped with sesame seeds as a dip, or thin with a bit more almond milk and use as a salad dressing.

Amy's Notes:

• Depending on how tangy you like your dips or dressings to be, add as much rice vinegar as you would like.
• 2 tsp minced ginger gave me the small hint of flavor that I was looking for, but others that are more crazy about it can make it more of a stand-out flavor by adding one or two more teaspoons.
• I added about 1/3 cup of almond milk to reach the consistency that is pictured.  I'll be adding a bit more to some of the leftover sauce to create more of a dressing to have on a salad this afternoon.
• This recipe makes a significant amount, so I would suggest maybe trying out a half of the recipe.
• I enjoyed my dipping sauce with some spring rolls I made for lunch yesterday.