Daring Cooks....Nut Butters

The July Daring Cook's 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.

I am really excited at the prospect of being a member of The Daring Cooks, this is my first crack at it, and I thought it all went very well.

The challenge was to make nut butters. I have made lots of asian style sauces using peanut butter, so I was pleased to see the challenge recipe was to make your own nut butters. I chose a recipe that required cashew butter, and the recipe goes a little bit like this....

ASIAN NOODLE SALAD WITH CASHEW DRESSING (Serves 3-4)

CASHEW BUTTER

1 cup unsalted CASHEW nuts, makes about 1/2 a cup of butter (I used my mortor and pestle as I halved the recipe, and it worked fine, you just need to put in some time and muscles grinding)

CASHEW DRESSING

1cm slice of GINGER, chopped

8 cloves of GARLIC, chopped

1/2 cup CASHEW BUTTER
1/4 cup SOY SAUCE

3 tbspn SUGAR

3 tbspn VINEGAR (I used Rice Wine Vinegar)

3 tbspn SESAME OIL

1/4 cup WATER

Hot Sauce to taste (I added half a red chilli, seeds and all)

NOODLE SALAD

225g thin RICE NOODLES

3 CHICKEN breasts, grilled and sliced

1 RED CAPSICUM, sliced thinly

1 CARROT cut into thin match sticks

4 shredded SPRING ONIONS

1/4 cup chopped CORIANDER leaves

some CASHEWS for garnishing

LIME wedge to serve

You can add any vegetables you like in an asian salad, and also use other meats such as prawns or seared beef.

The dressing was quite thick, so I would add some more water and some lime juice next time. If I didn't know, I would have thought I was eating a peanut sauce, so if you want to spend less, I would just make this with peanuts in the future. Also, Mr Hooper and I love garlic, but we were tasting it for days after this meal, so I would cut back to 5 or 6 cloves.