The Nutty-Gritty

(Note: I did take pictures. I even think they are good pictures. If only I could find my camera cable… Hopefully they’ll be up shortly!)

I like peanut butter cookies a lot, but that is (or was) about the extent of my experience in cooking with nut butters. Well, that and peanut butter and honey sandwiches, which are infinitely superior to PB&J and which I happily ate every day for breakfast and lunch when I was little. But I suppose one really can’t count either as “cooking”. This month, the Daring Cooks challenge was intended to break us all out of that rut: the goal was to prepare one or more recipes using a nut butter, ideally homemade.

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

Unfortunately, this month the usual sweltering Toronto summer descended – in spades. Day upon day of 30-plus highs, combined with the humidity that makes it feel more like 40, does not in any way inspire me to turn on the stove. Fortunately, our gracious hosts had suggested recipes for a lovely dip that was reminiscent of hummous – and yet at the same time, entirely different – which, with some vegetable crudités and grilled focaccia, made for a perfectly satisfying dinner, as well as a fantastically good cold rice noodle salad with a kicky cashew-butter based dressing. To round things out, with this week’s slightly lower temperatures I fulfilled an old ambition and put together my own interpretation of butter chicken (albeit using paneer), in a riff on the posted recipe for chicken in a curried tomato-almond sauce.

Thoughts upon completion? I’ve never made a habit of buying nut butters, as aside from the usual peanut butter they’re rather expensive, and so never cooked much with them. It’s really good to know now how easy it is to make them in small quantities at home – at least, it’ll be easy so long as my mini-chopper’s motor holds out – and I’ll certainly re-visit the salad and the dip. I played around with the flavourings in both, and more so with the dip, but the bones of both recipes were great. The makhani sauce needs some tweaking, and oh, how I wish I’d asked a former co-worker of mine for her recipe when I had the chance; I know she used cashews and no dairy, but the rest is a mystery. Too, to me it’s a winter dish; the name “butter chicken” doesn’t exactly imply “light”, which is what I want when all I can do is make like Sputnik and sprawl (poor kitty had a much harder time with the heat and humidity than we humans). Bean and Walnut Dip with Oregano (based on the challenge recipe for a White Bean and Walnut Dip with Rosemary)

This dip reminds me of hummous – beans, seasoning, and a nut butter (or seed butter, in the case of hummous). I think – and some of the other DCers demonstrate – that any number of different beans, nuts, and flavourings could be used, with delicious results. I used black-eyed peas, because I had ‘em to hand, and I think they were a fine substitute, and chose oregano since I have it in a pot on my porch. I didn’t toast the walnuts this time, but I think I will next time; I also added a bit of walnut oil because my butter was very, very stiff.

1 cup cooked black-eyed peas
1/2 cup of walnuts
3 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp fresh oregano
1 Tbsp walnut oil
juice of 1 lime
salt and pepper to taste

In a food processor or mini-chopper, grind the walnuts until they form a paste, about 2 minutes. Add the walnut oil, beans, garlic, oregano, and lime juice. Process until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Asian Noodle Salad with Cashew Butter Dressing

For this recipe, aside from the addition of fresh chilies to the dressing and my choice of vegetables (shredded cabbage and carrots and a red bell pepper), I changed almost nothing; I did skip adding any protein since I brought it to a potluck BBQ.

For the cashew butter:

1 cup cashews

For the dressing:

½ inch slice of fresh ginger, chopped
8 cloves garlic, more or less to taste, chopped
5 Thai bird chiles
½ cup cashew butter
¼ cup soy sauce
3 Tbsps sugar
3 Tbsps rice vinegar
3 Tbsps  toasted sesame oil
¼ cup plus 1 Tbsp water

For the salad:

1/2 pound thin rice noodles, cooked according to directions, cooled in a water bath, and drained
1 large red bell pepper, cored and seeded, cut into thin strips
1/4 head of green cabbage, shredded
3 carrots, grated
1/4 cup (60 ml) sliced green onions

Make the cashew butter: in a food processor or mini-chopper, process the cashews until a paste forms, about 2 minutes.

Make the dressing: in the food processor or mini-chopper, add in all other ingredients for the dressing and process to combine them into a fairly smooth, intensely-flavoured sauce.

Combine the cooked noodles and vegetables; toss to mix them thoroughly. Pour on the dressing and toss again to coat the salad completely. I put all the ingredients in the big tupperware container I was using to cart it to the BBQ, stuck the lid on, and shook it for a few minutes, which worked neatly.

Paneer in “Makhani” Sauce (loosely based on the recipe for Chicken in Curried Tomato-Almond Sauce)

One thing I will never understand is the instruction in some recipes to do something with onion – such as fry it in butter – and then discard the onion. Why? I would have thought that if one likes the onion flavour enough to do this, one would not have a problem with eating the onion itself… I also used fresh tomatoes rather than canned tomato sauce, since they were available and delicious and local and extremely cheap (surprisingly so, in fact), but if I were making it in winter I think I’d use canned diced tomatoes or crushed tomatoes to have full control over the final taste. I decided to use paneer largely because I wanted to try out the stuff my local grocery store sells (all in all, not bad, though not as good as fresh), and because honestly, I like it better than most meats.

For the almond butter:

1 cup whole raw almonds

For the sauce:

454 g fresh tomatoes, chopped
1 onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic
5 minced Thai chiles
1 1/2 tsps garam masala
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp fresh-ground black pepper
1/2 cup almond butter
4 Tbsp butter
plain yoghurt, to thin and smooth out the sauce as necessary
salt, to taste

454 g paneer, cut into cubes
1 onion, sliced

Make the almond butter: process the almonds in a food processor or mini-chopper until they form a fairly smooth, oily paste, about 2 minutes (or a little longer, in my case).

Make the sauce: melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add in the sliced onion, chiles, and garlic. Cook for about 10 minutes, until the onion is softened and fragrant. Add the spices and saute for another few minutes.

Stir in the chopped tomatoes and allow them to come to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes or so. Whisk in the almond butter. Use an immersion blender, food processor, or blender to blend the ingredients into a fairly smooth sauce. It will probably be quite thick; I used several spoonfuls of yoghurt to thin it out. Add salt to taste. Set the sauce aside.

Fry the paneer: in a skillet, heat a little oil and fry the onion until softened, 5-7 minutes. Add in the paneer, spreading the cubes in a single layer, and cook for several more minutes, flipping often with a spatula. Pour on the makhani sauce. (I only used about half the sauce, and as an experiment I’ve frozen the remainder…)

I served the paneer with home-made parathas stuffed with a little onion and chives, basmati rice, and a quick dish of cabbage and green beans cooked with mustard and cumin. It was utterly delicious, although the sauce could have been more intense in my estimation and it did make my kitchen feel like a sauna.

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