Again, many thanks to all who have supported me through the ‘Satay’ adventure via this thread.
To clarify a couple of things, I was staying with friends in France last week. They had spoken repeatedly of a remarkable Satay dish eaten at a seaside restaurant some 4 years ago. When I began my attempts to recreate their dish I hadn’t realised their memory was so distant, I thought it had been last summer or perhaps that before when they had been at Pornic, the seaside town concerned.
My friends are retired restauranteurs with decades of experience but their excellent cooking is based on traditional French food with a sprinkling of Italian dishes thrown in. ‘J’ opened the first pizzeria in the area in 1990 when all local banks refused to support him with such a ridiculous project! That restaurant was a success and trades to this day under new ownership.
A little context is now perhaps relevant to properly respond to other comments.
At each recent meeting J and M have spoken of their love of their Satay Gambas and last week they showed me the various powders and potions bought online or sent by a family member living in Turkey. J and M know that at home I cook some ‘exotic’ dishes and so again they asked if I had any advice. I inspected the spice mix from Turkey, it might have been interesting when fresh but it had no aroma and its composition remains a mystery as it had been bought from a market in an unlabelled bag. A similar bag holds a half kilo of ‘safron’ but if the content is really safron I’m the man in the moon. Never mind, Turmeric makes a nice base for some things and the powder will probably stay in its bag until the end of days.
The above resulted in me starting this thread in hope that collectively we might make some progress. I studied your advices and also read around the topic across the Internet. I asked my friends to tell me of any flavours they could recall from the Pornic dish. Both said only that peanuts gave texture to a sauce that was delicious with the famous gambas. We weren’t getting very far and I was somewhat lost having never seen Satay let alone tasted it. I don’t like peanuts as I have written before. I will try anything once however so I attempted to put together a list of items that could be found locally. Had I been cooking at home the list would have been different because we have a few Asian stores not too far away and Mr Amazon will deliver from his grocery by next day. We subscribe so next day delivery in the UK is free and that saves us a lot of petrol.
M came shopping with me. We searched everywhere for gambas or other appropriate seafood but bearing in mind that much of France was badly hit by snow last week produce from the sea was thin on the ground at best. I suggested chicken or pork. Chicken was M’s reluctant choice but she insisted we shouldn’t buy an entire bird because she still gets them wholesale and has a freezer full. There wasn’t time to defrost a bird she advised. At home I could have done that but I wasn’t at home. My choice would therefore have been boned chicken thighs but we were forced to go for breast fillets as these were the only organic option available and I won’t buy the other types of chicken meat in France or the UK knowing very well how the birds have been raised.
While the hypermarkets in rural France are vast their stock supports traditional French cooking, some Italian and a minute range of Asian ingredients. We scoured the town for lemongrass but there was none to be had. In the end I bought a bag of dried leaves intended for tisane that the very pleasant young woman at a ‘Bio’ (organic) supermarket assured me others had used in cooking. You have seen the stuff we returned home with. The dried lemongrass might be useful if J and M run out of tooth picks.
Back at J and M’s I explained our progress to J. He announced that he doesn’t eat the white meat of chicken because it is dry and flavourless and therefore not worth the effort of chewing, in his view it is an acceptable cat food. I tried to assure him that I was capable of making it tasty and moist. J returned to his crossword and his Gitaine.
Having put the meat to marinade I created a sauce based on peanut butter and coconut milk, the thicker part having gone into the marinade I used the more liquid part to let down the sauce. I asked J and M to taste said sauce. Both pronounced it good but nothing like that they had enjoyed at Pornic. Only now I was told that the original peanut sauce had been red in colour.
I don’t know why but I had assumed that having cooked the meat in its coating the sauce would be served cold like a condiment. By now the chicken was almost ready, also the rice and M asked how I would be cooking the sauce. I quickly tipped it into a saucepan to warm through. In fact as you can probably see from the photos posted earlier I managed to split the sauce but by now I was becoming exasperated so I said nothing and whisked in a little water, a technique that has saved sauces for me previously. Not really a success but I don’t think that really mattered.
All morning I had been encouraging J to at least taste the chicken. I knew that I had failed when I saw a pan of beef stew simmering on the hob. It was a good stew, we had eaten the same earlier in the week and as J and M still cook restaurant quantities (nothing is wasted, food is portioned and frozen) there was plenty.
It is unfortunate that all this happened at a time when J and M have just sold their beautiful home due to retirement causing reduced finances. In France for people of our generation who have managed their own business retirement is financially complicated, I might write on that elsewhere because different decisions taken earlier would have produced a much better outcome and I know there are other eGullet members working in France. My friends are preparing for a move to the coast where they must now find a much smaller home. They have lived within 50km of their current home all of their lives so even while the choice to move to the Atlantic is their own it is a huge thing for them. Location choice was made so that they can be close to their grandchildren. I won’t go into other personal issues save to say that the death of M’s youngest sister on Christmas Eve hasn’t helped. All of this has caused depression and intolerance that is understandable.
In other circumstances I would have been both hurt and annoyed. A great deal of effort went into that dish even if it was far from authentic. J and M know vaguely about this forum and I had made clear that we were privileged to have the advice of experienced cooks from around the world.
In the circumstances as they are I can only repeat my sincere thanks to you all. Apologies for wanderings in this response; I wanted to fill in some of the context for those who have been so helpful over the past week. I will certainly use a similar marinade in the future and perhaps even work on the sauce. Your advice has broadened my own limited experience of this style of recipe and learning something new is positive even when the outcome wasn't quite as I had hoped!
COOKING THE CHICKEN
Having cut the chicken into strips before putting them into the marinade I then rolled those strips and set them out in the baking dish pictured in Friday’s post. That went into a warmed fan oven at 200c for 20 minutes. We use the same technique at home for tandoori style chicken when we can’t grill outside and it does produce moist meat, flavour enhanced by the marinade in which the rolled strips are coated. My husband makes a curry dish using chicken thigh meat cooked in this way and at the moment that is my favourite dinner. He has prepared that for us to enjoy tonight, first night back home, when now retired DH gets home from work 
Most of what I bought in France came home with me. The peanut butter stayed with J and M because their grandson is with them for a week. He had never tasted peanut butter but found that he likes it very much so his breakfast comprises that on bread for now. He is an extremely active 10 year old so I don’t think the calories will cause him a problem. If only I had his energy!
