Thai Chicken Salad Wraps

More About This Recipe

• Back in my (not-so) glory days, I worked at a sandwich/coffee/smoothie/pizza/candy shop (yeah, we sold a lot of stuff). Nearly every day, I’d get up around 4 a.m. to get there by 5 a.m., brew gallons upon gallons of coffee – and drink a few myself – stock the bakery cases with fresh bagels and muffins the size of my fist and enjoy a long, leisurely morning with the regulars. Those were the days. And then, the lunch rush came. You could hear the herd rumbling in from a mile away. At around 11:50 a.m., a tornado of ravenous teachers, lawyers, stay-at-home moms and teenagers came rushing through the place, ordering hundreds of sandwiches, wraps, lattes, cookies, chocolate and candy (did I mention we sold a lot of stuff?) until they finally left an hour or two later, leaving behind smears of pizza sauce, bits of tortillas and cookie crumbs all over the tables and floor, whence I proceeded to hide in a cabinet under the counter and suck my thumb until the end of my shift. Ah, yes – those were the days. These Thai Chicken Salad Wraps remind me of those days. Minus getting up at the crack of dawn, brewing enough coffee I could swim in it and the impending Lunch Rush of Doom, of course. But we did have some pretty killer wraps at the shop (thus the tornado), and I do miss eating them every now and then. The tornado, not so much.
• But ANYWAY – let’s talk more about these wraps. I get weak in the knees when it comes to Thai peanut sauce. Something about the combination of peanut butter, soy sauce, brown sugar and garlic just… ugh, it’s just beautiful. And then I go and toss it together with cubes of chicken, cabbage, carrots, scallions, cilantro and peanuts and…I die. It’s almost too good to eat. Almost. The salad tastes best after sitting in the fridge for a few hours so the flavors can meld together, but if you’re even remotely as impatient as me, you can eat it right away. I like rolling it up in wraps with some butter lettuce tucked inside, but it also tastes yummy in lettuce wraps, on sandwich bread or right out the bowl at 2:30 in the morning. Not that I would know anything about that, psh… I’m giving up getting up before the rooster crows, drinking coffee through an I.V. drip and quivering in fear at the sight of a mob of teachers – but the wraps? Those can stay.